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In the Master's of Telecommunication Engineering program at the University of Deusto, Spain, courses in communication circuit design, electronic instrumentation, advanced systems for signal processing and radiocommunication systems allow students to acquire concepts crucial to the fields of electronics and communication. During the educational project presented in this paper, students build a continuous-wave frequency-modulation (CWFM) Doppler radar system from components as simple as ordinary cocoa cans and common electronics components placed on a breadboard without any soldering. One of the goals of the project is to stimulate students' interest in building an entire, completely functional communication system that integrates the knowledge acquired in the various courses and whose functioning they can check in real scenarios. This paper describes this learning project and the ways in which it helps students understand and connect all the concepts that underlie a fully operative communications system, thus meeting the competencies and learning outcomes of the courses involved in the project.

This paper presents an analysis of introducing active methodologies in the Computer Architecture course taught in the second year of the Computer Engineering Bachelor's degree program at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain. The paper reports the experience from three academic years, 2011-2012, 2012-2013, and 2013-2014, in which three types of data were considered for analysis: students' dedication, as measured by time spent on the project, their marks, and their level of satisfaction. The study shows that about 86% of students are satisfied with the teaching methodology and are willing to continue using it in future courses. The study also shows that the active methodologies used contribute to the students' cross-curricular training and do not generate any great increase in student workload. Finally, a statistical analysis of the evolution of student performance showed that marks improved to a statistically significant extent after introducing active methodologies.

The University of Vigo, Vigo, Spain, has the objective of making all the teaching material generated by its teachers freely available. To attain this objective, it encourages the development of Open Educational Resources, especially videos. This paper presents an experience of recording lectures and generating the corresponding videos as a step toward this objective. The core system used to record lectures is Opencast Matterhorn (free and open-source customizable software to support the management of educational audio and video content). This paper also focuses on the study and analysis of the students' experience of using recorded videos as support for their learning process. This case study was carried out in the Fall 2012 offering of the first-year Computer Architecture course in the University of Vigo's Telecommunication Technologies Engineering program. Finally, the paper addresses students' level of satisfaction with the recorded lectures and gives students' opinions on the use of these videos.

Contribution: This paper describes a highly flexible design for a master's-level server administration course that uses updated technologies, addresses the most important course design challenges and extracts useful feedback from student work. The main contribution of this design is eliminating the self-regulation challenge students encounter in similar highly flexible computer-related courses. This is attributed to the introduction of orientation lectures and a competitive element; these may have helped students to achieve their goals on time. Background: The Web server administration course on the master's of the Web engineering program was intended to inculcate a series of competences, such as common administration techniques, procedures to increase security, efficient website deployment, and an introduction to clusters and infrastructure deployment automation. The course generally failed to transmit these competencies effectively; complaints were made about the difficulty of the course and the low applicability of its contents. Intended Outcomes: The design facilitates students finding assessment activities that better suit their profiles or previous experience, and enables them to customize their assessment, thus encouraging them and giving future value to their work. Application Design: The course design maximizes assessment flexibility by providing students with many optional activities from which to choose. It also promotes a healthy competitive spirit to improve student's motivation and results. Findings: Complaints about the difficulty or lack of applicability were no longer made. The course is highly valued by the students, achieving a very high pass rate and average score.

After 10 years of organizing the Cybertech robotics competition, this paper presents this unique and innovative educational experience of teaching engineering at Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. Cybertech is not only a well-known robotic contest in Spain due to the "Robotaurus" bullfighting, but is also a whole academic activity spanning theory, laboratory practical lessons, seminars, tutoring, and a spectacular contest in which robots, developed by the students, compete. It is an open activity, for all students and grades, requiring knowledge of various subjects such as mechanics, microcontrollers, control, and electronics. The experience acquired has shown how this novel educational approach can boost the motivation of students, who in a real applied project effectively learn not only the particular subject matter, but also skills in teamwork, oral presentations, budget management, and so on. This is considered the flagship of innovation in education at UPM. This paper describes the evolution of Cybertech over the past 10 years, summarizes the educational experience, and provides some statistics and results as well as a perspective for future editions of the competition. (Contains 10 figures.)

Conceptual models are applied as the first step in software design methodologies for collecting the semantics involved in the universe of discourse. Nevertheless, the abstraction process creates some misunderstandings for novice designers, such as difficulties in modeling some constructs and in understanding the semantics that they represent. This paper presents a thorough study of errors detected among Database Design students in Computer Science Engineering when they apply the abstraction process to generate a conceptual schema using a specific model. Specifically, the paper focuses on errors made in the design of ternary relationships. Some heuristics are proposed in order to help novice designers avoid these common errors, and an experimental study is presented to compare the number of errors made by the students before and after applying these heuristics. (Contains 10 figures, 2 tables, and 3 footnotes.)

Educational software tools are considered to enrich teaching strategies, providing a more compelling means of exploration and feedback than traditional blackboard methods. Moreover, software simulators provide a more motivating link between theory and practice than pencil-paper methods, encouraging active and discovery learning in the students. The use and development of educational software is a field that has grasped the attention of teachers and researchers from different disciplines and theoretical frameworks in the last few years. In this paper, the authors present SoftwarE for Learning Formal languages and Automata theory (SELFA), an educational software simulator tool, designed to improve the quality of teaching in Theory of Computation courses. The aim of this tool is to make it easier to teach and to learn the main concepts of this subject, whose level of abstraction makes both activities difficult. The main advantage of this tool over other software tools designed with the same purpose, is that it has been developed using web technologies. This allows the user to collect and analyze data on how and when a student or group has used the tool. These numerical data can then be used to evaluate the student's work. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

This paper presents a case study analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of using project-based learning (PBL) combined with collaborative learning (CL) and industry best practices, integrated with information communication technologies, open-source software, and open-source hardware tools, in a specialized microcontroller and embedded systems engineering Master's course. In addition to addressing industry requirements in both contents and methodology, the course develops capabilities and competencies in problem solving, independent learning, teamwork, and technical knowledge. Since PBL methodology alone does not ensure teamwork, it was complemented with CL. Design review meetings (as described in IEC 61160), deliverables, and organizational resources were also introduced to mirror industry demands. This structure integrated course content and student academic achievement in a simulated industrial environment. The course had students build a modular management system for home appliances, implementing control software on the "Arduino" open-source platform, as well as using wireless communications. The results show that teaching, learning, and student assessment processes can be improved by using PBL with CL. In addition, the introduction of industry practices, such us peer review meetings, brings academia closer to a real-world context.

This paper presents the results of two educational experiments carried out to determine whether the process of specifying requirements (catalog-based reuse as opposed to conventional specification) has an impact on effectiveness and productivity in co-located and distributed software development environments. The participants in the experiments were 76 students enrolled in three courses on project management for software development at the University of Murcia, Spain, and the Mohammed V University of Rabat, Morocco. The results of a fixed effects meta-analysis (Hedges' g) obtained a medium effect (-0.495, p=0.034) for productivity, and a large effect (-1.077, p<0.001) for effectiveness, in favor of using a catalog-based reuse process rather than a conventional specification process. The other co-factor examined, distribution (either global or co-located), had no statistically significant interaction with the process used (catalog-based reuse or conventional specification) for either effectiveness or productivity. Further research is required to study the effectiveness and productivity of the catalog-based requirements engineering learning method so that it can be taught in software engineering courses and applied in real software engineering projects.

This paper surveys how the computer input/output (I/O) subsystem is taught in introductory undergraduate courses. It is important to study the educational process of the computer I/O subsystem because, in the curricula recommendations, it is considered a core topic in the area of knowledge of computer architecture and organization (CAO). It is also a basic knowledge to be acquired in order to work in areas such as human-computer interaction (HCI) or embedded systems. Examination questions, course syllabi, and textbooks were analyzed to identify which teaching approaches are being used. Individuals teaching the I/O subsystem could choose between the options explained here, according to their intended learning outcomes. In addition, a literature survey was conducted on the development and use of tools to improve student understanding of I/O and to make the topic less abstract and more attractive. A goal is to indicate to computing education researchers that the majority of the literature reports experiences in developing or using different resources or educational methodologies, but that these are not based on a theory of learning.

The interdisciplinary nature of robotics allows mobile robots to be used successfully in a broad range of courses at the postgraduate level and in Ph.D. research. Practical industrial-like mobile robotic demonstrations encourage students and increase their motivation by providing them with learning benefits not achieved with traditional educational robotic platforms. This paper presents VEGO, an industrial-like modular vehicle platform for robotic education with an appropriate infrastructure that has been demonstrated to be very useful at the postgraduate level. Besides learning engineering concepts, in performing industrial-like exercises, students develop valuable skills such as teamwork and the capacity to solve problems similar to those they may encounter in a real industrial environment. The developed infrastructure represents a valuable platform for robotic education that can be used in many different disciplines as a way to demonstrate how to cope with the difficulties and challenges related to the development of industrial infrastructure systems. The platform evaluation proved its ability to inculcate the expected engineering skills. A novel approach is adopted through the use of multidisciplinary and close-to-industrial-reality platforms developed under an incremental approach and using an open and customizable structure.

Automated assessment systems can be useful for both students and instructors. Ranking and immediate feedback can have a strongly positive effect on student learning. This paper presents an experience using automatic assessment in a programming tools course. The proposal aims at extending the traditional use of an online judging system with a series of assignments related to programming tools. Some empirical results on how students use an automated assessment system in a CS2 course are presented. Research suggested that automated assessment systems promoted the students' interest and produced statistically significant differences in the scores between experimental and control groups. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

This paper describes how a new "Moodle" module, called "CTPracticals", is applied to the teaching of the practical content of a basic computer organization course. In the core of the module, an automatic verification engine enables it to process the VHDL designs automatically as they are submitted. Moreover, a straightforward modification of this engine would make it possible to extend its application to other programming languages. The module provides students with real-time knowledge of the state of their work by their accessing the result of the automatic assessment or feedback messages. Teachers have a constant global view of the status of their class and have available multiple options such as sending feedback messages to students, obtaining statistics, launching additional verifications in batch, and so on. Likewise, the module substantially improves some organizational aspects, and its design may help teachers to encourage teamwork. Its use partially frees teachers from certain routine work, saving time that can be devoted to teaching objectives and tutoring activities. (Contains 4 tables and 5 figures.)

This paper describes a practical experience of adapting the teaching of a course in Computer Technology (CT) to the new demands of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). CT is a core course taught in the first year of the degree program Technical Engineering in Management Computing in the Faculty of Computer Science at the University of A Coruna (UDC), Spain. The contents of this course are mainly devoted to the design of digital systems. The main purpose of the adaptation has been to focus more on students, clearly defining the abilities they will develop during the course and suggesting activities that facilitate the development of those abilities. The aim of this work is to describe how this adaptation was performed, the materials and activities prepared, the difficulties encountered, the goals achieved and the response of students and teachers to these changes. (Contains 6 tables and 2 figures.)

Studying fundamental Computer Architecture and Organization topics requires a significant amount of practical work if students are to acquire a good grasp of the theoretical concepts presented in classroom lectures or textbooks. The use of simulators is commonly adopted in order to reach this objective. However, as most of the available educational simulators focus on specific topics, different laboratory assignments usually require the use of different simulators. This paper presents a graphical and interactive reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor and memory simulator that allows active learning of some theoretical concepts covered in Computer Architecture and Organization courses. The simulator can be configured to present different processor views, from a simple serial one, without caches or pipelines, to a more realistic one with caches and superscalar execution. This approach allows a set of increasingly complex code-based laboratory assignments to be developed using a single simulator, covering topics ranging from assembly language programming to the analysis of the different kind of cache misses, pipeline hazards or branch prediction hits and misses produced during a program execution. The simulator has been included in a an automatic assessment system that helps the students to complete the assignments and helps teachers to evaluate the correctness of the students' solutions in different environments, such as high-enrollment courses or distance education. Since 1996, both the simulator and the automatic assessment system have been successfully used by more than 5000 students in Computer Architecture and Organization courses at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain. (Contains 1 table and 10 figures.)

Teachers in e-learning play a crucial role as facilitators of the students' learning experiences. To this end, a teacher needs to monitor, understand and evaluate the activity of the students in the course. What is more, e-learning can be enhanced if tools for supporting teachers in this task are provided. In this paper, two experiences are presented to show the convenience of providing teachers with such tools. These experiences proved that providing support to teachers allowed them to assess the students more closely. As a result, the students' dropout rate in a postgraduate course was reduced and the number of students who passed a physics course in secondary education was increased. (Contains 4 tables, 3 figures, and 3 footnotes.)

Studying fundamental Computer Architecture and Organization topics requires a significant amount of practical work if students are to acquire a good grasp of the theoretical concepts presented in classroom lectures or textbooks. The use of simulators is commonly adapted in order to reach this objective. However, as most of the available educational simulators focus on specific topics, different laboratory assignments usually require the use of different simulators. This paper presents a graphical and interactive reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processor and memory simulator that allows active learning of some theoretical concepts covered in Computer Architecture and Organization courses. The simulator can be configured to present different processor views, from a simple serial one, without caches or pipelines, to a more realistic one with caches and superscalar execution. This approach allows a set of increasingly complex code-based laboratory assignments to be developed using a single simulator, covering topics ranging from assembly language programming to the analysis (If the different kind of cache misses, pipeline hazards or branch prediction hits and misses produced during a program execution. The simulator has been included in a an automatic assessment system that helps the students to complete the assignments and helps teachers to evaluate the correctness of the students solutions in different environments, such as high-enrollment courses or distance education. Since 1996, both the simulator and the automatic assessment system have been successfully used by more than 5000 students in Computer Architecture and Organization courses at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM), Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]