A Modern Wearable Devices Course for Computer Science Undergraduates

A problem that many tech companies face today is that many computer science students entering the work force lack fundamental skills for understanding the entire process of a system that is not solely software. Some students may take a series of courses on analog and/or digital circuits, but the integration with modern devices is sorely missing from most curricula. We designed the Tufts University Comp 50: Wearable Devices course to introduce the basics of digital and analog circuits to students with software-driven backgrounds by studying the intricacies of the production of wearable electronic devices. The course focused on the skills needed to design hardware, software, and a chassis for a final wearable product that was novel and potentially marketable. The primary objective was to provide a course that serves as an introduction to digital electronics but with a tangible goal to produce a high-fidelity prototype that student teams presented at the end of the semester. Given the nature of modern wearable devices, which are small, energy efficient, and strongly favor connectivity to other devices, we developed the curriculum around designing a surface-mount Printed Circuit Board (PCB), and we outfitted the student kits with coin-cell battery powered, Bluetooth-connected, Arduino-compatible devices that they needed to learn how to program and connect. We also integrated iOS development into the course so that students' final projects could communicate with both their phones or tablets, or to the Internet via these devices. As the "wearble devices"' field is relatively new, this paper discusses the decisions we made for the set-up of this class, what worked and what did not, and what we would change and improve when we teach it again.