Abstract:

Teaching is an art, an art which is always evolving and enhancing. Teachers and lecturers have to be up-to-date all the time, especially when it comes to technical courses with a lot of hardware involved.

In the last couple of years, using virtual machines instead of real computers have become more an more popular and students use their own machines during the lectures instead of the lab computers. The way of teaching has also been changed, lecturers providing the students with evaluated, work-ready environments in virtual machines are handed out in many courses. This is an enhancement which also brings some disadvantages, it comes handy for the universities in terms of saving energy or sparing reinvests in hardware, but it also brings up problems which have to be faced when it comes to working with real hardware. Students leave university with a degree in computer science without ever touching the hardware-parts inside a computer, they often do not know how to change them if some part fails within a desktop or server computer. Students are used to clone the machine or restore a snapshot which is not always possible on real machines.

This paper shows some solutions for this problem, based on the experience of lecturers. Some courses have been changed in the way of teaching and changes in the curricullum have been planned to change this "enhancement" for good.

Keywords:

Education, learning, computer science, hardware.