EXPERIENCES FROM TEACHING HARDWARE IN A COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT

As the author holds a Ph.D. degree in computer engineering (CE) and has searched for a new teaching position in computer science (CS) departments recently, he found that there is a new trend that some CS departments are trying to offer traditional computer engineering courses in hardware field to their students. The author is newly hired by a CS department which offers both CS and Information Technology (IT) degrees and assigned to teach a hardware course. The experiences received from teaching this hardware course is shared here and can be used by CS departments offering traditional CE courses to re-think their curriculum.

This course is CPSC 315 Computer Gadget Projects. The course description is: This course introduces the students to digital electronics and programming based on popular single-board microcontroller and single-board computer system platforms to interact with their environment with sensors and actuators, which can find applications in robotics, home automation, the Internet of things, cyber-physical systems, and sensor networks. Topics include the architecture of single-board microcontroller and single-board computer system, basic electricity and electronics, system connection and configuration, and programming. The pre-requisites are CPSC 146 Programming Principles and CPSC 207 Shell Commands and Scripting.

The Arduino microcontroller kit and Raspberry Pi Model 3B single-board computer is adopted in the class to build circuits and use to write programs to control the hardware. With their easy to program interfaces and the programming background of students, it is easy for learners to build circuits and understand the restrictions imposed by hardware. The observations and outcomes in this course are valuable for CS departments offering CE courses.