A New Curriculum for Teaching Embedded Systems at the University of Ljubljana

In recent years the population enrolling university studies in Europe has topped 50%. At the same time we are witnessing an ever faster technological development in the area of embedded systems. All these changes called for an urgent response to make the teaching of embedded systems more attractive and affordable to a wider population. As a result we have completely redesigned our curriculum. Not only have we utilized new technology, we have changed the entire approach to teaching. In the past we started with assembly language, which we considered basic, and only later moved to embedded C. From a motivational point of view this was not ideal, since the gap between the assembly language and the students´ pre-university computer experiences, which mainly involve using Windows- like applications and Internet, was getting too wide. Higher computer languages were taught in parallel without an immediate connection to embedded systems. Our new set of courses starts out with JavaScript, which feels very much like C, is free, and motivationally proved an instant success. Next comes the transition to embedded C which is now much less painful and the assembly language level is left for special courses in later semesters, addressing specific hardware issues. As for hardware platforms, we wanted students to have their personal powerful embedded development system, whose price should not exceed an average textbook. Since professional embedded development systems are far from being cheap, at first that sounded a bit unrealistic. However, we came up with a special concept, which attracted sponsors from industry, so we could raise the necessary funds. Most courses related to embedded systems now use the same platform with only different add-on boards, which further reduces the per-system price and getting-started overhead. Since the students can do much of their work at home, the after hours spend in the laboratory are less which frees our resources to other activities.