A Remote Test Environment for a Large-Scale Microcontroller Laboratory Course
We report on a remote test environment for a mandatory undergraduate lab course on microcontroller programming at RWTH Aachen University. Since the course is being attended by up to 320 students each semester, it is not possible to provide comprehensive supervised on-site access to the laboratory equipment during the preparation phase of the participants. To deal with this common scalability problem of lab courses we implemented a remotely and continuously accessible test pool with full feature support of the used microcontroller platform. The paper presents the architecture and the detailed implementation of the pool, and we provide an evaluation of its success based on usage statistics and student feedback.
Author
Manfred Smieschek, Stefan Rakel, David Thönnessen, Andreas Derks, Andre Stollenwerk, Stefan Kowalewski