Student-Inspired Project-Based Learning in an Embedded Systems Course

This paper presents the experience of the author from a senior embedded systems course at an engineering college. The course is primarily made up of lecture and laboratory components. Besides those two components the course also includes a peer-teaching component and a final-project. In the peer-teaching component the students are expected to choose a topic related to the course material, perform thorough research, and then present the material to teach it to the whole class. The goal of the final project component is to challenge the students to come up with a problem of their own that can be solved using the material learned in the course. The students are encouraged to dig deep into their creative minds and come up with practical projects that address real problems. They spend time to brainstorm ideas for their projects and present their proposals to the whole class for comments and approval, before they actually start to implement their work. The main take away from the experiences of these projects is that the students felt ownership of their projects and spent every effort to bring their ideas to fruition. Most of the project teams involved two or three students from different disciplines so they bring their expertise from their respective fields to the project. Overall, based on the grade performance of the students in the course and feedbacks received at the end of the course, this student-inspired project-based-learning approach was found to be successful in enhancing the learning experiences of the students.