A Design of Engineering PBL on Embedded System for Novice Freshmen Students

This paper deals with the educational scheme of PBL (project based learning), in which student groups build autonomous robotic vehicles for a competition game.In their scheme, students are split into 4 expert groups which consist of mechanism, actuator/power, sensor/communication, and embedded system groups. Students are given lectures in each group at first to be "experts", then form teams to build vehicles.One of the most challenging point is to provide appropriate tools for embedded system group because students (freshmen) are very beginner. For this purpose, the authors decided to employ "mbed" microcontroller development board and on-line development tools. In addition, studentes are given some fundamental function circuit boards such as motor driver board to build vehicle easily without soldering.This PBL was held as a lecture of nearly 400 students and its results are also discussed in this paper.