A Hands-On Approach To Teaching Microcontroller

Practice and application-oriented approach in education is important, and some research on active learning and cooperative problem-solving have shown that a student will learn faster and develop communication skill, leadership and team work through these methods. This paper presents a study of student preference and performance while learning the microcontroller subject with a 2-day curriculum that emphasized on hands-on approach. The curriculum uses the PIC16F877A microcontroller and participants learned to develop basic circuits and several other applications. Programming was completed on the MPLAB platform. Results show that participants had better understanding in this subject after attending the hands-on course.