Teaching embedded systems for energy harvesting applications: a comparison of teaching methods adopted in UESTC and KTH

Fan, H., Wu, X., Ghannam, R. , Feng, Q., Heidari, H. and Imran, M. A. (2020) Teaching embedded systems for energy harvesting applications: a comparison of teaching methods adopted in UESTC and KTH. IEEE Access, 8, pp. 50780-50791. (doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2980336)

Abstract

Further to China’s plan that was introduced in 2017 for attracting more students into engineering, many Chinese universities have started to explore new teaching methods that can be adopted into their programs. This shift was geared towards developing student-centred teaching materials rather than traditional teacher centred instruction. In this manuscript, we compare two different methods of instruction for a course on energy harvesting using embedded systems. We describe the learning materials and showcase the impact that project-based learning has had on a cohort of Chinese students that were enrolled in a joint master’s program between the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) and the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). KTH has made remarkable progress in the teaching of embedded systems technology for energy harvesting applications, with great emphasis on active as well as collaborative learning. We demonstrate two examples of projects that Chinese students have completed in KTH and present evaluative data regarding their experiences. Our results show that KTH’s approach in teaching this module has had a positive impact on student learning, with an average of 80% of students think that teaching in KTH is conducive to students’ independent exploration.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The work of Hua Fan was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61771111, supported by Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Important Projects under Grant 19ZDYF2863, as well as supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation under grant 2017M612940 & 2019T120834 and Special Foundation of Sichuan Provincial Postdoctoral Science Foundation. The work of Quanyuan Feng was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61531016, supported by Sichuan Provincial Science and Technology Important Projects under Grant 2018GZ0139, 2018ZDZX0148 and 2018GZDZX0001.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Imran, Professor Muhammad and Ghannam, Professor Rami and Heidari, Professor Hadi
• Authors: Fan, H., Wu, X., Ghannam, R., Feng, Q., Heidari, H., and Imran, M. A.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering > Electronics and Nanoscale Engineering; College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering > Systems Power and Energy
• Journal Name: IEEE Access
• Publisher: IEEE
• ISSN: 2169-3536
• ISSN (Online): 2169-3536
• Published Online: 12 March 2020
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2020 The Authors
• First Published: First published in IEEE Access 8: 50780-50791
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License