New Perspectives in Science Education

A recent major curriculum revision moves the nuts and bolts of Microcontroller programming into the focus of secondary level professional training at Austrian Technical Secondary Colleges. In order to meet the curriculum’s educational objectives, a laboratory course for 12th graders has been especially designed to enhance the students’ hardware and software skills. The chosen hardware setup combines the Arduino platform with a small, low cost robot car. This allows to simultaneously address two hitherto missing key components in embedded system education, software/hardware co-design and real-time operating systems.

The course subdivides a comprehensive annual robotic project into several strongly interrelated sub-projects, each to be realized by a small team of students. Formal Lab Reports enable every student team to seamlessly continue the work of the preceding team and to transfer their own results to the subsequent team. This process improves the students’ technical writing skills and their general communication competence.

The presented study describes the design of the laboratory course and investigates the intrinsic motivation of this students with regard to the sub-projects. Five teams of about 10 to 12 students each, consecutively working on different sub-projects, will complete a short questionnaire to assess their intrinsic motivation, based on the “Intrinsic Motivation Inventory”, at the end of their sub-project and again after four to six weeks.

First results support the expectation of high levels of student motivation at the finalization of the respective sub-project. For the temporal evolution of the intrinsic motivation, we expect a slight decrease due to findings in similar studies.

This quantitative study will contribute to research and development in teaching Microcontroller courses in secondary level technical education.