Increasing Student Interest Through Hardware Ownership

摘要

With the significant drop in cost of embedded microcontrollers,1, 3 there now exists anopportunity to give every student a trainer that they can take home to work on and can keep at theend of the semester. At Vermont Technical College, one of the courses has been modified toinclude a Microchip PIC16F877 based trainer board. The trainer board comes in kit form (a PCBand components) and the students assemble the board and then use it in several labs and a smallproject at the end of the semester. This paper details the trainer board itself and the benefits ithas brought to VTC and its students.