Abstract:

Nowadays, digital signal processing (DSP) methods are widely used for various tasks (measurement and control in industrial facilities, telecommunications, radar and radio navigation, video image processing, etc.). The proper study of this science is an important part of computer science engineer education.
The most effective way for Masters to learn this field is to participate in research work. DSP research is carried out with complicated devices and is very difficult for students due to lack of practice and experience and it becomes absolutely impossible in isolating circumstances due to coronavirus disease. Some topics, as well as practical work with physical electronic devices, become inaccessible while it’s still critical for theory comprehension.
The authors propose a methodology for teaching students by means of digital twins of the real DSP devices. Digital twins are based on National Instruments platform and designed by authors specially to be applied in education, therefore they have transparent structure, logic-driven architecture and graphical user interface for programming. All these benefits of digital twins provide students an opportunity to get a quick start to design DSP-programs, generate new algorithms and analyze the results. Moreover, the whole system is consolidated as a toolkit that makes it possible for students to connect and carry out any DSP researches remotely.
The article describes short basic technical information about the toolkit and all necessary details to embed it into curriculum. Authors emphasize the way the toolkit helps students to overcome psychological barriers in DSP research and adequacy of digital twins towards real DSP devices in education.
The described work has been supported by the Russian Federation Ministry of Education and Science, the Government Contract #0705-2020-0041. The proposed methodology had been applied for the past 3 years in the course of Master's degree program at the Department of Informatics and Control Systems jointly with the Research Institute of ICS in Bauman Moscow State Technical University. The annual tests and survey with feedback revealed that the usage of this toolkit increased the quality of student’s understanding of educational material by 16% on average, and the rate of their interest in this course increased by 22% compared to the average values of the previous years. Due to learning under lockdown this year, the proposed technology was approved to be technically feasible and effective to be used in distance learning at the university.

Keywords:

Toolkit for education, digital twin, remote research, distance learning, signal processing teaching.