Abstract:

This paper aims to provide an innovative hands-on tool for self-learning of telecommunication technologies by means of a self-contained “student’s box” with all items required to develop a practical and real use case. It is expected to reinforce the learning process in this field which is usually limited to theoretical classes or even laboratory ones based on simulation only.

The main idea behind this paper is to motivate students to “learn by doing” and apply the theoretical studies they have in an actual system they themselves can build. The focus will be put on a use case that most of them find everywhere every day, which is the “transportation and accessing-control system”. This will be performed by applying radio frequency identification (RFID) at the near field, which is also known as Near Field Communications (NFC) and commonly referred as “contactless”. This technology received recently significant interest with the expectation that the size of the RFID market is going to reach more than USD 27.56 billion (according to Grand View Research) and with sells around 39 billion passive tags per year following IDTechEx.

This experience is part of an Educational Innovation project which is presently under development in the School of Telecommunication Systems Engineering at Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain. The project is now in progress and the materials and results finally obtained will be applied to a Master course on short-range wireless communications at UPM and to another Master course on Radio Frequency and Antenna Subsystems at Carlos III University, Spain. At this year’s conference, we will describe the items included in the RFID student’s box, the architecture of the system to be developed, and the use case to which be applied. It is scheduled to put this project into practice next academic year, so results on its influence in the learning process will be provided in the 2025 edition of this conference.

The RFID student’s box includes the use of microcontrollers (such as Arduino) with the “know-how” to connect it with RFID readers. In addition to having the ability to deal with NFC tags by designing how to assign specific NFC tags access to the system, hence, in case of authentic user access, a welcome message will appear on an LCD screen and a 3D-printed gate of the accessing system connected to a motor will be be opened but, launching audio and visual alarms to prevent unauthentic access otherwise. A lab reference guide is also included to help students in their work and learning process.

It is worth noting that the components and codes in the box can be readjusted so students can apply to different practical RFID-based applications such as: automatic student-attendance registering at the university, getting local information while visiting museums, supermarkets and retail outlets, library management, and animal and specimen identification. This comes with the possibility to extend the development to such systems and propose it as a final degree project.

Keywords:

Self-learning, Learning by doing, Educational innovation projects, RFID, NFC, Radiocommunications, 3D-printing.