Teaching strategy on VHDL course based on participative learning

Abstract

Learning from experience had been shown as effective learning method, for instance Confucius, (450 BC) wrote “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”, or more recently by the psychologist David Kolb when he said on his book that “a person would learn through discovery and experience.” In our course, we follow that practical strategy on which learning is based on exploring and thinking. To motivate the students' interest had provided good results to engage students in the contents of our course. In particular, we suggest them to build their own complete embedded system, which structure and purpose is completely decided by the students. This freedom makes the students be stimulated, interested and enjoy, moving them to find the solutions they require in learning material. In this way, students feel that knowledge to acquire in the course is useful instead of just something boring to learn for an exam, but at the same time the use of that material allows them to internalize it and get new skills. But also, once the project finish makes students feel self-confident to face engineering challenges that they may find in future work. During the last years, the students achieved design and debugging skills on VHDL by facing the challenges from their own proposed system. Commonly, students go deeper in the areas when they feel interested than when teachers request them. It is because students find the relevance of the knowledge when it provide solutions to them. Also, this motivation moves students to spend more hours in the project than they use to spend in other subjects. In fact, students even decide to buy FPGA training boards to keep working at home (prices start from 36$). The elements developed by the students in their embedded systems, use to be the hardware controller for PS/2 keyboard and mouse, graphic controller, music generator with or without digital to analog converters, access to different memory modules. Provide multiple solutions based on hardware finite state machines. But also the software in that system, that use to be some kind of computer game.