Open and Low Cost Techniques to Foster Engineering Education: The Smart Egg Classifier Example

Rapid growth of the electronics industry resulted in a plethora of innovative and cheap devices, while fluent documentation and user-friendly programming environments are available for them. Modern educational systems worldwide have exploited this situation by incorporating practices reflecting this progress, under the STEM umbrella. Remarkable progress has been made in secondary education, but tertiary education should also follow. In this regard, the approach being presented highlights the design and implementation steps of a system for automatic classification of eggs. The whole approach utilizes open and easy-to-find software and components, e.g., arduino-like boards, cheap electronic and electromechanical modules and recyclable materials. The prototype system has been developed by students of agricultural engineering, assisted by their professors, and tested during the STEM4Agri Erasmus project, with most of the focus on its university and vocational education exploitation perspectives. According to a first set of survey findings, this STEM activity paradigm has many and multi-perspective benefits for the participants and can be seen as a flagship case of activities that should be incorporated into the curricula of educational institutes to keep in pace with the recent technological achievements and the forthcoming job transformation necessities.