Laboratory at home : actual circuit design and testing experiences in massive digital design courses

Abstract

An innovative laboratory methodology for the digital design introductory course is presented. We replace the traditional lab experiences, where students have to come to school classrooms, with a “lab at home” concept. More than 65 kits with a programmable logic board are given to groups of students for the whole semester. Thus, students perform all the lab stages, including analyzing the problems, designing a solution and testing the actual circuit, at their homes. Then, they come to school to show their circuits to the professors. These evaluation instances, together with a final exam, are enough to adequately evaluate the students’ work, eliminating the need of a midterm exam. This is the third edition of the course with this methodology. A survey of opinion showed that the experience was very successful among students. Moreover, it is very suitable for massive courses and easily scalable, providing actual hardware platforms for students at an affordable cost for the institution.