Development and Evaluation of Educational Materials for Embedded Systems to Increase the Learning Motivation

Educational materials of embedded systems are currently used in many educational institutions. However they have difficulties to arouse the interest of students. One of the reasons is that a poor CPU, which has been loaded in the current materials, cannot execute the multimedia processing. In order to make the exercises in embedded systems more practical, we developed an educational board, which we call “E+.” E+ is equipped with a RISC microcontroller 32bit SH2, which is manufactured by Renesas Electronics Corporation. As I / O interface, in addition to buttons and LEDs, it is loaded with sensors such as light sensors and temperature sensors, a full-color LCD display with a touch screen, voice input / output modules, Ethernet communication and an SD card on board. We introduced E+ to the 3rd grade students (about 40 students) in the computer architecture class of department of electronics and information engineering at Ishikawa National College of Technology. This paper shows that the students are interested in the materials and that they learn the contents in an efficient manner. We conducted an evaluation after the one-year class of computer architecture. The question which asks “Are you satisfied with the learning in this educational material?" scored a high value 3.80 / 5.00. The question asking “Was this exercise helpful to improve your general technical capabilities of making things?" also scored a high value 3.54 / 5.00.