2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Digital Circuits Fundamentals is a junior course offered for mechatronics engineering students at our university. Traditionally, this course covered number systems, switches, combinational and sequential logic circuits design, and FPGA programming. In recent years, there is a need to introduce microcontrollers to the students in this course. The reason is that our program does not offer a microcontroller course, but microcontrollers are used very often in senior design and the course projects of some upper division courses. The efforts of adding Arduino to the curriculum of Digital Circuits Fundamentals started about three years ago. In particular, we have used a low-cost Arduino kit and redesigned two lab assignments to teach students how to use Arduino and how to interface Arduino with digital displays and sensors. A low floor, wide walls, and high ceiling signature-thinking hands-on course project involving Arduino is required. The students may select any project topic that satisfies the following conditions: (i) It is either useful or fun and (ii) It has to include a digital display and a sensor or a motor. In addition, the project must have a signature-thinking component, i.e., some aspects of the project must be original.

This paper details how the course was redesigned, the newly added lab activities involving Arduino, and the efforts the instructor put in to ensure the success of the course projects. It should help the engineering programs that do not offer a microcontroller course incorporate Arduino into their curriculum. This paper will also showcase several student projects and some of the design. These projects indicate that students’ critical-thinking ability and creativity can be greatly increased when given the freedom to develop their own signature-thinking projects.