Abstract:

In many countries, including Slovakia, there is a high demand for skilled IT specialists. To train such specialists, a high quality education in STEM subjects has to be available on technical universities. In this work, we are particularly interested in the subject Principles of computer engineering (PCE) taught to all first year students at the Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies (FIIT) at the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. Among other topics, students are introduced to the concepts of basic building blocks of digital systems, logic gates, boolean algebra, combinatorial and sequential circuits, logic analysis and synthesis. To test their knowledge, they are given home assignments. The results have to be uploaded into the electronic system in the form of a MS Word document containing all calculations, tables, graphs, schemas and also commentary on how the results were obtained. The documents are then manually reviewed and evaluated by the teachers.

To summarize the main problems with the current situation regarding teaching PCE at FIIT, we polled the teaching staff involved with PCE in the last 5 years (14 people) and some students involved in the last 2 years (66 responses). Some of the results are as follows:
a. The manual assignment review and evaluation process is very time consuming for teachers. 100 % of teachers voted positive.
b. In recent years, an overwhelming majority of first year students are coming to FIIT from secondary grammar schools without prior exposure to the aforementioned topics. Only specialized secondary school students are familiar with these on at least the basic level. It is hard for many students to grasp the new topics in the very short amount of time provided for them at the start of the semester before they are forced to submit their first assignments. 64 % of students expressed some form of difficulty was the main hurdle with their assignments.
c. Students typically solve their assignments with pen and paper, then they fill in their results into the MS Word document. This process can be time consuming and frustrating because there is an increased chance to make mistakes and also working with logic expressions is not very well supported in such text editors. 60 % of students think this process was the main problem they faced.
d. 17 % of students think the system of home assignments should change, 75 % think it should stay.

Based on these collected results, we concluded the course of action to improve the teaching process to the best satisfaction of both parties, teachers and students, would be to design a web application with the following properties:
1. Step-by-step assistance with the assignments (addresses problem d.).
2. Improvement of the instructional text provided alongside assignments (addresses problem b.).
3. User-friendly interface and automatic generation of documentation (addresses problem c.).
4. Automatic evaluation of results (addresses problem a.).

In this paper, we will describe the application in detail, provide additional information on testing, feedback from users, discuss the potential use cases and lay out the future work.

Keywords:

Digital system, logic gate, logic circuit, boolean algebra.