A Review of Embedded Systems Education in the Arduino Age: Lessons Learned and Future Directions

Abstract

In this paper, the subject of embedded systems education in the Arduino age is examined. Arduino is an open-source microcontroller platform that has been widely popular in the past decade among hobbyists and academics. Arduino is increasingly being adopted in courses that span different disciplines in schools and universities. As a result, numerous papers are being published every year in different engineering education conferences and journals reporting the integration of Arduino in teaching. In this work, the impact of Arduino on embedded systems education is investigated. First, challenges facing embedded systems education are identified from the literature. Second, different Arduino teaching integration methodologies reported in the literature are surveyed and analyzed. Third, the question whether Arduino successfully addresses embedded education challenges or not is discussed taking both surveyed findings and recent market trends into consideration. Finally, a number of open-ended research directions are proposed.