GENERATION OF MATERIALS FOR ACTIVE LEARNING. AN EXAMPLE IN THE COMPUTER SCIENCE AREA

The degree of commitment with which a student approaches these subjects depends on their motivation, which in turn depends on the teacher's strategy. In the case of certain concepts which students do not always consider to be useful in a particular field for practical professionals, different activities must be planned to encourage their active participation and maintain their interest.

The efforts demanded of the student can only be attained if they trust that the path we show them is not only profitable but truly formative. This is where the use of adequate tools along with a good educative mentoring becomes important. Other methodologies encourage the use of interactive technology in the classroom, designed to demonstrate the knowledge gained during class.

In these initial learning stages, where classwork and individual or group exercises are presented, one requires a comfortable way of generating custom digital signals, which may serve as Boolean logic functions that evolve over time, or clock signals for digital components requiring synchronization. We are aware that during an initial course it is more important that students understand concepts than become proficient in the use of tools. From this standpoint, using applications that graphically illustrate the design and that are easy to use, greatly facilitate this objective, far more than if the student had to learn to use more complex tools, which would be incorporated once the course advances, all this without losing sight of the level to which the student must be guided, vital to their learning development.

Experience shows us that a task which is simple when using a blackboard or pen and paper, becomes tedious when it has to be carried out within a document or digital app, then we discover something undesirable, such as that sometimes easily tasks become time consuming. On the other hand, having a chronologically variable binary signal in digital format offers us the possibility of using this or adapting it for use at other stages, where these fundamental areas have to be understood.

In order to illustrate the behaviour of a digital circuit, adequate, functional timing diagrams are necessary to show every possible outcome which must be illustrated in order to understand the function of each component. Generating timing diagrams is a continuous necessity in order to put forward examples and conditions that serve to analyse the behaviour of digital systems.

The absence of a specific tool for teachers to clearly demonstrate the workings of certain digital circuits and for students to use in their individual tasks to demonstrate what was explained in class, is what motivated us to build this application.

The students were encouraged to use the application with examples during a period, after exercises were presented to be solved. When the lesson was finished, the students had to do a specific evaluation about how digital circuits work and score results of evaluation were recorded in a Learning Management System.

Following the principles of Learning Analytics, we have extracted the data about the number of times that the students have accessed the available resource at the LMS. This means the number of times that students have tested different circuits using the application tool.
According to the statistics, the application has meant a potent strategy to increment the quality of the student learning process.