The Impact of Incorporating Hands-on Raspberry Pi Projects with Undergraduate Education in Boosting Students' Interest in Scientific/Engineering Majors and Encouraging Women and Minorities to Advance their Integration in Practical Fields

• Published in: 2019 IEEE Learning With MOOCS (LWMOOCS) pp. 7 - 14
• Main Authors: Hallak, Hussam A., Ibrahim, Soad, Low, Christy, El Mesalami, Ayman
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2019
• Subjects: C++ languages; Education; Light emitting diodes; Minorities in Computer Science; Problem-solving; Programming; Raspberry Pi; Switches
• DOI: 10.1109/LWMOOCS47620.2019.8939622

By design, the computer science curriculum for undergraduate students in the United States does not include enough hands-on courses such as microcontrollers and embedded systems. It is difficult for students, especially the Distance Learners (DL) to appreciate the power of computer science as a problem-solving field without real-world experiments. Furthermore, students in computer science may drop-out or turn away from the field because it does not offer an opportunity for them to communicate with each other during online/traditional labs. In this paper, an active learning project-based approach in online/traditional computer science courses is introduced to make the courses' material more attractive to students from minorities. Students obtain a deeper knowledge through active exploration of real-world problems. Students will enjoy the challenges they face when developing solutions. This paper studies the impact of hands-on project-based learning using Raspberry Pi on students taking online and face-to-face computer science courses at Old Dominion University.