Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, many university courses had to abruptly transform to enable remote teaching. Adjusting courses on embedded systems and micro-controllers was extra challenging since interaction with real hardware is their integral part. We start by comparing our experience with four basic alternatives of teaching embedded systems: 1) interacting with hardware at school, 2) having remote access to hardware, 3) lending hardware to students for at-home work and 4) virtualizing hardware. Afterward, we evaluate in detail our experience of the fast transition from traditional, offline at-school hardware programming course to using remote access to real hardware present in the lab. The somewhat unusual remote hardware access approach turned out to be a fully viable alternative for teaching embedded systems, enabling a relatively low-effort transition. Our setup is based on existing solutions and stable open technologies without the need for custom-developed applications that require high maintenance. We evaluate the experience of both the students and teachers and condense takeaways for future courses. The specific environment setup is available online as an inspiration for others.
翻译:由于COVID-19的流行,许多大学课程不得不突然转变,以便能够远程教学。调整嵌入系统和微控制器的课程是额外的挑战,因为与实际硬件的互动是它们的组成部分。我们首先将我们的经验与教学嵌入系统的四个基本备选方案进行比较:(1) 在学校与硬件互动,(2) 在学校有远程获得硬件的机会,(3) 为在家工作向学生发放硬件,(4) 虚拟化硬件。之后,我们详细评估了我们从传统的离线学校硬件编程课程到远程使用实验室中真实硬件的快速过渡经验。有些不寻常的远程硬件访问方法被证明是教学嵌入系统的一种完全可行的替代方法,能够实现相对较低的过渡。我们的设计基于现有的解决方案和稳定的开放技术,不需要高维护程度的定制开发应用程序。我们评估了学生和教师的经验,以及未来课程的冷藏套子。具体的环境设置可以在线提供,作为其他人的灵感。