Abstract:

Student in the last courses of technical related degrees feel a transition in the education process from the basics set of knowledge which supports the fundamentals and the skills that they need to acquire to a much more practical-related contents focussed on their future professional development [1,2]. The use of Information Technology (IT) can help to create tools that allow both, improving the theoretical teaching and helping students with their autonomous learning. Moreover, we do believe that the learning process can be improved further if the students take part in the software development tools. The idea is that, every year, the students of the considered courses develop new tools and also validate the usefulness of the software developed in the precedent courses. Finally the students participate in an evaluation process of each piece of software, including a set of possible improvements of the codes in the forthcoming years.
In this work we will present a computer tool that has been developed in the last few courses by students under our supervision. This tool is intended to provide and promote the skills necessary for the design of simple microwave amplifiers, covering concepts as the stability, the scattering parameters, the microwave matching networks...

The academic tool has been tested within a complete semester; the results in terms of the competence acquisition in the design of microwave amplifiers with respect to the precedent course have shown outstanding improvements over 40% in the skills development.

Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by the University of Granada via Project PID-10-54. Collaboration of our students from courses “Transmisión por Soporte Físico” and “Circuitos de Radiofrecuencia y Microondas” is also acknowledged.

References:
[1] Hum, S.V. et al, IEEE Antennas and Propagation Magazine, vol. 49, pp. 175-184, 2007.
[2] Pozar, D.M., “A Modern Course in Microwave Engineering”, IEEE Trans. Education, 33, 1, 1990.

Keywords:

Microwave, RF, autonomous education, IT.