A challenge that new engineering students have when developing programs is trying to determine how to plan out their program. Should the student include a loop? Two loops? One after the other? One inside another? When adding sensors and actuators -- as we do in our course -- when should the sensor be read and […]
The assessment of student learning in the formative stage of a university programming class has become very challenging for a number of reasons: the pandemic has generally disrupted learning processes at the elementary and high school levels Prior to the pandemic, reading and note-taking habits had changed, possibly making them less effective. IDE-specific tools catch […]
Heard about Virtual Programming Lab (VPL) and eClass at York and want to "kick the tires" a little? If you haven't already, VPL is a plugin for Moodle (eClass at YorkU) that allows instructors to create interactive programming activities for students. Here is some introductory material. [this may need an update after the update in […]
One of the places that Moodle falls down in is in supporting math assignments. It occurred to me that we could treat math assignments like we do programming assignments by extending the Virtual Programming Lab plugin for Moodle to support Maple. This doesn't replace existing products like the Maple / DigitalEd Möbius platform, nor does […]
Introduction The 1st year programming courses in the Lassonde School at YorkU were revamped for the 2020/21 school year so that students could do hands-on lab activities from home. The students took two programming classes: Matlab procedural programming in Fall 2020 Java object-oriented programming in Winter 2021 In both courses the students used Arduino-compatible hardware […]
[this is a draft... it needs to be cleaned up.] I'm using MATLAB 2019b, whereas you are probably using something a little newer, like 2020b. It shouldn't make much (if any) difference. Open up MATLAB and then go to Add-ons and check out the Hardware support packages. You'll be greeted with a list of all […]
The programming and embedded systems curriculum in engineering should be constantly revised as the underlying methods and technologies are constantly changing. Here, I'm exploring how we can update the systems we use in our first year programming class at the Lassonde School. Low barriers to entry are key as many of our students have […]