Sophomore Level Programming Concepts And Methodology Course In Computer Engineering, Covering Both Hardware And Software

Abstract

One of the retention problems in an engineering discipline is that the students are not introduced to their field early enough to have a good understanding of their profession.Usually, the first two years of the engineering undergraduate program are spent in completing general education and science requirements.With this in mind, the authors have developed a sophomore-level Programming Concepts and Methodology lecture/lab course in the Computer Engineering Department at San Jose State University, which emphasizes the key elements of computer engineering.The main objective of this course is to illustrate how a high-level program, in this case C language, interacts with peripheral hardware.Throughout the semester, students are introduced to C language to be used on a microcontroller-based board to interface with sensors and transducers.A complete set of lab exercises enable students to build robots as a class project without requiring any background in electronics or programming.The course also introduces the fundamentals of embedded systems and hardware/software co-design to sophomore students.