Contribution: Internships designed to provide training and an initial period of contact with industry, prior to a computer science engineering capstone project, have a very positive impact on both industry and academic capstone projects. Background: Internships and capstone projects are widely used to integrate work-related learning in computer…

Contribution: There exist software tools designed for professional or research purposes that may serve for grounding the learning of real-time scheduling within introductory courses. This article contributes with a hardware and software infrastructure aimed at improving the learning process of the essentials of real-time scheduling in…

Contribution: A novel project-based learning (PBL) approach applicable to diverse design-oriented engineering courses. This article reports the application results during six academic years (2012/13 to 2017/18) for electronic instrumentation (EI) course for third-year Industrial Electronic and Automation Engineering majors. Background: Engineering…

This paper describes the design of an industrial informatics course, following the project-based learning methodology, and reports the experience of four academic years (from 2012-13 to 2015-16). Industrial Informatics is a compulsory course taught in the third year of the B.Sc. degree in industrial electronics and automation engineering at the…

Contribution: An improved inverted lecturing (IIL) framework based on blending flipped lectures and hands-on experiments provides instructional benefits, compared to traditional teaching (TT) and inverted lecturing (IL), in an introductory course in digital systems. Background: IL has proven more effective than TT in improving student learning in…

Contribution: An analysis of the extent to which sustainability is present in the syllabi, project briefs, report templates, and student final reports of the three Iberian European project semester (EPS) providers, over a five-year period. Background: EPS is a one-semester capstone project framework that adopts project-based learning and…

Continual advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) are revolutionizing virtual education and bringing new tools on the market that provide virtual solutions to a range of problems. Nevertheless, nonvirtual experimentation using computer-aided control system design tools is still fundamental for future engineers. This paper…

In carrying out their capstone projects, students use knowledge and skills acquired throughout their degree program to create a product or provide a technical service. An assigned advisor guides the students and supervises the work, and a committee assesses the projects. This study compares student and staff perceptions of key aspects of…

Interference and diffraction of light are elementary topics in optics. The aim of the work presented here is to develop an accurate and cheap optical-system simulation software that provides a virtual laboratory for studying the effects of propagation in both time and space for the near- and far-field regions. In laboratory sessions, this software…

Teaching electrical and computer software engineers how to configure network services normally requires the detailed presentation of many configuration commands and their numerous parameters. Students tend to find it difficult to maintain acceptable levels of motivation. In many cases, this results in their not attending classes and not dedicating…

As embedded systems are becoming prevalent in everyday life, many universities are incorporating embedded systems-related courses in their undergraduate curricula. However, it is not easy to motivate students in such courses since they conceive of embedded systems as bizarre computing elements, different from the personal computers with which they…

This paper describes a laboratory project consisting of a PC power supply modification into an intelligent car-battery conditioner with both wireless and wired networking capabilities. Adding a microcontroller to an average PC power supply transforms it into a flexible, intelligent device that can be configured and that is suitable to keep car…

WIRIS quizzes are an online mathematics tool for educational purposes that upgrade Moodle quizzes and allow the development of personalized quizzes using random data and conditional instructions. WIRIS quizzes can be used in any mathematics or science degree; their complex operators allow it to be used to solve electrical circuits. This tool…

An evaluation of the educational effectiveness of a didactic method for the active learning of greedy algorithms is presented. The didactic method sets students structured-inquiry challenges to be addressed with a specific experimental method, supported by the interactive system GreedEx. This didactic method has been refined over several years of…

The paper proposes lab work and student competitions based on the LEGO NXT Mindstorms kits and standard LabVIEW. The goal of this combination is to stimulate design and experimentation with real hardware and representative software in courses where mobile robotics is adopted as a motivating platform to introduce mechatronics competencies. Basic…