Software tools in electronics — Experiences from teaching the course

In this paper, experiences from founding and teaching a course Software Tools in Electronics are presented. The course teaches students to use basic software tools to document their work, to draw circuit diagrams, to do numeric and symbolic computing, to provide graphical presentation of data, and finally teaches Python both as a programming language and as a tool for numeric computing, symbolic computing, and graphical presentation of data. The course covers only the tools that are free software, and in introductory part of the course licensing and social issues are covered. Tools taught at the course are listed, the reasons behind their choice are explained, and teaching experiences and impressions are stated.