PROJECT-BASED LEARNING APPROACH APPLIED IN THE COURSE "CODING IN TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEMS"

The paper describes the application of the project-based learning approach, one of the trends of Education 4.0, for increasing students' motivation for learning the material studied in the course "Coding in Telecommunication Systems" on the topic of Hamming codes by using different computer-based tools, such as MS Excel, Logisim, ISE Project Navigator, creating bilingual interactive multimedia testing exercises, etc. The applications are used in the educational process in the course "Coding in Telecommunication Systems" for Bachelors in the specialty "Internet and Mobile Communications" in our University. Nowadays, the progress of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the educational innovations have provoked the university professors to develop more effective teaching and learning approaches for attracting students' attention and motivating them to learn the material. The university professors are trained to transform the "conventional teacher-centred approach" into the "innovative student-centred approach" using ICT and project-based learning approach. ICT in education are applied with the aim of providing more facilities to students to learn the issues. The use of ICT in learning will improve the efficiency, motivation, critical, logical and analytical thinking and facilitate the active, experimental and consistent learning [2]. The paper describes different approaches applied in the course "Coding in Telecommunication Systems" for increasing students' motivation using project-based learning on the topic of Hamming codes solving the following problems: 1) studying the theory of Hamming codes in advance based on the idea of flipped-classroom; 2) building MS Excel-based applications for illustrating the principle of operation of encoders and decoders of Hamming (7, 4) codes, 3) building the circuits of encoders and decoders of Hamming (7, 4) codes in Logisim; 4) creating bilingual multimedia interactive applications in English and Bulgarian, with various types of testing exercises, allowing students to learn basic concepts in the theory of Hamming codes.