Enhancing Experiential Learning to Address Loss of Hands-on Laboratory Due to Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

All sectors of life have been hit hard by the pandemic caused by covid-19. This impact has been brutal on streams like engineering in the educational sector, where practical or laboratory courses play a vital role in learning. Due to the limitations of online learning, the students could not explore the full extent of hands-on learning in their Fourth semester ARM microcontroller course. In order to compensate for the loss, the laboratory activities in the Fifth semester RTOS (Real-Time Operating System) Laboratory course are enhanced to provide students with a hands-on learning experience in building applications in both the ARM and RTOS environment. The extended activities enhanced student learning in the ARM environment, which they were previously deprived of during online instruction. Also, emphasis is provided on applying optimization techniques to memory and timing requirements for a given problem statement. The results show that the extended activities helped students co-relate and integrate concepts addressed during their 4th and 5th-semester courses and build a small application of the embedded systems. Keywords—Embedded Real-time systems; Extended Activity; project-based learning;