Abstract:

Microcontrollers are at the core of every robotics application, whether educational, industrial, entertaining, or artistic. Sometimes they are hidden from the user who is enjoying a higher-level interface and programming language, but often the users are being exposed to the internals of the low-level programming in a direct way. Some would argue that the low-level is too difficult, misses the required abstraction, and contains too many technical details and thus it is too challenging, others would correctly point-out that by disclosing this layer to the students, we are creating a much better understanding of the system they are studying, while leaving the abstractions to their imagination. At the same time, we are opening for the possibility for the excellent students to take on their learning experience, and develop new products as they advance further on. We believe that both approaches are useful and depend on the target group, situation, kind of students, and learning goals. We have applied programming microcontrollers in several undergraduate courses, summer schools, robot clubs, and workshops. In this article, we explain our experiences, learning situations our students experienced, and solutions we have developed in various courses in the past years, including running a large introductory course for tens of students with microcontrollers in two different ways, and the feedback from the students - both quantitative and qualitative.

Keywords:

Microcontrollers, undergraduate studies, arduino, stm32.