A Novel Race Track Platform For Teaching Microcontroller System Design Concepts

The primary goal of the sophomore microcontroller system design course [7, 8] offered by Bucknell University’s Electrical Engineering Department is for the students to gain experience with the key concepts of microcontroller-based system design. However, because this is a sophomorelevel course, the students typically do not have substantial prior experience with assembly language programming, digital devices, or analog devices. As such, the first half of the course has traditionally been devoted to the development of assembly language programming skills and interfacing concepts for digital and analog devices. Consequently, many of the more complex, high-level concepts such as polling, interrupts, state machines, and control algorithms are not introduced until late in the course. This late introduction limits the students’ exposure to these concepts and often prevents the students from employing these concepts in their final term projects. This paper describes changes being implemented for the next offering of this course that are intended introduce these more complex topics earlier. The motivation behind these changes is to improve the students’ understanding of these more advanced topics by giving the students more experience with these topics earlier in the course.