Experimental Teaching Reform to Embedded System Curriculum

With the rapid development of embedded technology, the traditional experiments of embedded system curriculum meet several challenges, such as the experiment design is lack of comprehensive perspective, the experimental program is insufficient to cultivate the students' independent development ability, and the teaching contents cannot keep up with the development trend of embedded technology. To address these challenges, an experimental teaching reform to the embedded system curriculum is implemented in this paper. To enable the students to build a comprehensive perspective to the embedded system architecture, five courses related to the embedded system are integrated to construct a complete embedded architecture ranging from the underlying hardware to the upper application. To strengthen the students' independent development ability, a real-time multithreaded embedded OS is required to be developed by the students. To keep the teaching contents up with the development trend of embedded technology, some emerging technologies such as multi-core embedded architecture, LoRa, NB-IoT, etc., are proposed and used as the experimental cases. The experimental teaching reform targets to enable the students to establish a comprehensive embedded system perspective, become proficient in the embedded software and hardware skills, cultivate the cross-layer software and hardware collaborative optimization thinking, and master the way to solve some difficulties in the embedded system. The teaching reform has been implemented in the Internet-of-Things speciality for four years, and the survey results proved it had achieved the expected teaching effects effectively.