Abstract:

Students of media arts usually lack systems- and software engineering experiences. These experiences are often required, when innovative projects are carried out. We have therefore designed courses where students of media arts can obtain knowledge in these fields. Based on that we designed courses focusing on the emerging group of students selecting interdisciplinary subjects.

We conducted a research on didactical methods well suited to transfer knowledge and develop the required systems engineering competencies. We have defined parameters describing the desired output for the course. For the different types of output grading schemas were defined. We have then designed course content and didactical methodology using a four phase model.

Courses were carried out at two Universities in parallel. We have not varied the content or methodology, but only the involvement and presence of the lecturer and the grading procedure. We have selected two project platforms that students used implement individual arts projects: Videowalls based on distributed Raspberry PI systems and systems integrating Linux based Kinects.

The experience presented in this paper show that students of media arts can be attracted to engineering subjects. The use of didactical methods as pair teaching, group puzzle or open space are well suited to replace classroom teaching and can be used in combination with problem oriented learning. In our view grading is time consuming and challenging.

Keywords:

Systems engineering, software engineering, engineering didactics, video walls, kinects.