Abstract:

This paper describes a 6-hour course that is part of a larger guidance program at the university of Padova. In general, the aim of this kind of teaching unit is to make high school students more familiar with the topics of university courses of study, eventually stimulating curiosity and interest, to be further detailed with more specific guidance events. More specifically, the course described here aims to introduce students to the basic characteristics of a digital system, making them acquire some basic technical knowledge and appreciate the main potential of digital technologies. Furthermore, the module also stimulates critical thinking with respect to technology limitations and threats. For this reason, students are introduced to basic systems thinking skills, which help them to analyze digital technologies with a wide perspective. This leads students to reflect on the effects of complexity, costs, limited reliability, power consumption, rare raw materials need, on a wide scale in terms of time, people involved, or consumption of the planet resources. Such a perspective stimulates the students to reflect on the need to reduce the impact on the planet resources and on people's well-being of the technological phenomenon, stimulating the development of a sustainability mindset.
In summary, the expected learning outcomes of the teaching unit are divided into two main categories: disciplinary knowledge and skills and systems thinking skills. The former group can be summarized as follows: to recognize examples of digital systems in different contexts; the concept of information and its binary representation; robustness of digital information to circuit-level noise and disturbances; to be able to describe a digital system at different levels of abstraction (application, algorithm, programming language, machine code, gate levels); VLSI technology as a mean to physically realize a large amount of basic logic operations per second. A more systemic view is then introduced highlighting the huge complexity of a fabrication plant for integrated circuits: this opens the active discussion with students on the consequences of fabrication and verification costs, reliability, and power consumption. Students can analyze the complexity with the aid of basic tools of systems thinking: through group activities, they develop skills such as recognizing the system as a whole, identifying schemes, dynamics, and structures, recognizing cause and effect relations, and appreciating the difference between being complex and being complicated. Despite the limited time, an introduction to some typical tools such as reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, and the iceberg model is given.

The teaching unit has been conducted three times between January and March 2025, for a total of 66 attending students, whose age ranges between 15 and 18 years. A brief survey was delivered at the end of the module. More than 70% of the students rated the course very positively, while just 4 students did not appreciate it. More than 80% of the attendees consider the active learning approach to be highly effective in helping them understanding the topics. Finally, interest in the different topics was assessed separately: they have been all evaluated as interesting or very interesting.

Keywords:

High school, guidance, digital systems, Systems thinking, sustainability mindset.