Abstract:

Nowadays, increasing students' motivation is a great challenging task for university educators requiring the lecturers to apply innovative ideas such as creative teaching, audio, and video tools, working in teams on projects, etc. The main steps are to engage students distracted by looking at their phones staying focused on one task, and motivating them to have a greater enthusiasm to learn and work.

The aim of the course "Digital Signal Processing", mandatory in the curriculum of the specialty "Information and Communication Technologies", is to acquaint bachelors with the main issues of theory and practice of digital signal processing. One of the basic topics in the course is "Design of Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) Filters in MATLAB". Its aim is for students to learn to apply MATLAB and its extension Signal Processing Toolbox for designing IIR (recursive) filters of low-pass, high-pass, band-pass, and band-stop configurations using Butterworth, Chebyshev (type I and type II), and Cauer approximations.

The paper presents the main stages of the project-based learning (PBL) approach and the active learning methods used during the classes when teaching the topic with the problems solved by students. PBL engages students in learning, using activities such as "reading, writing, discussion, problem-solving, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of class content". Active learning methods also provide students with informal opportunities for feedback on the extent to which the students understood the material studied. This is really important in distance learning in the COVID-19 pandemic during the last two academic years. An additional advantage is that students can perform all tasks at home because in the exercises they use software (MATLAB or SciLab) to design IIR filters.

Keywords:

Project-based learning, infinite impulse response filters, digital signal processing, MATLAB and Signal Processing Toolbox.