A Blended-learning Course on Microcontrollers / Team contest
On December 16th, the final presentations were given from the participating teams of the 2nd Blended-learning Course on Microcontrollers / Team contest. The course duration was five weeks and started on November 16. The participants were tutored remotely on the hot field of modern microcontrollers, under the sponsoring of IEEE’s Circuits ans Systems Society and the Hellenic Open University. Students were able to access and program arduino systems connected to a variety of equipment such as sensors, leds, lcd & tft screens, ethernet modules etc., in order to perform nine basic exercises. The systems were located at the DSMC Lab, were available 24/7 and the students could observe the results of their experimentation through a web camera connected to each of the systems. Each week an electronic lecture was given from the course tutor, Dr. Vassilis Fotopoulos, through the university’s Sentra Symposioum system since the students were located to distances up to 750km from the lab.
The students formed teams, according to their IEEE student branch, and to each team the organisers sent a package containing an arduino uno, basic electronic components (breadboard, jumper wires, servo, raley, sensors etc.) and a different shield for each team (ethernet, gsm, xbee) in order to design a prototype system of their own. Three teams finaly presented their projects in a parallel session of the 1st IEEE Greek student branches congress, held in Patras. The projects included a GSM alarm system, a galvanic skin response monitoring application and an ethernet controlled home automation system. Attendance certificates bearing the logos of IEEE CASS and DSMC, were issued to all team mebers while at the same time each student branch that participated in the final contest, received a 7” android tablet, a hardcopy of “Arduino cookbook 2nd ed.”, an Arduino UNO board and a starter kit containing various test components. The event was quite succesfull and we hope to offer a new enriched version of the course really soon.
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