2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A new curriculum has been developed for an advanced embedded systems course. In this course, students construct a webcam from the ground up, resulting in a professional, aesthetic product. Along the way, they practice surface-mount soldering, PCB design, web design, 3D design, and embedded programming. The course is a guided journey in creating a device at the level of a minimal viable product at a startup company, and feeds into a followup class where students pursue the journey without constraints, with novel projects. To assess the efficacy of the curriculum, several markers were analyzed. First, results of anonymous surveys were reviewed. Second, anecdotal evidence was reviewed. Third, the success of students in the followup course was evaluated. Overall, the findings show that the course is effective in empowering the students to be independent designers who have valuable skills to industry.