This paper provides an analysis of embedded systems education using a didactic approach. Didactics is a field of educational studies mostly referring to research aimed at investigating what's unique with a particular subject and how this subject ought to be taught. From the analysis we conclude that embedded systems has a thematic identity and a functional legitimacy. This implies that the subject would benefit from being taught with an exemplifying selection and using an interactive communication, meaning that the education should move from teaching “something of everything” toward “everything of something.” The interactive communication aims at adapting the education toward the individual student, which is feasible if using educational methods inspired by project-organized and problem-based learning. This educational setting is also advantageous as it prepares the students for a future career as embedded system engineers. The conclusions drawn from the analysis correlate with our own experiences from education in mechatronics as well as with a recently published study of 21 companies in Sweden dealing with industrial software engineering.

No abstract

No abstract

ABSTRACT:We present experiences from a final year M.Sc. course. The overall aim of the course is to provide knowledge and skills to develop products in small or large development teams. The course is implemented in terms of large projects in cooperation with external partners, in which the students, based on a product specification, apply and integrate their accumulated knowledge in the development of a prototype. This course, which has been running and further elaborated for 20 years, has been proven successful in terms of being appreciated by the students and by the external partners. The course has during the recent years more frequently been carried out in close connection to research groups. Our experiences indicate benefits by carrying out these types of large projects in an educational setting, with external partners as project providers, and in close cooperation with research groups.Having external partners as project providers feeds the course, students and faculty with many industrially relevant problems that are useful for motivational purposes, and in other courses for exemplification and for case studies in research. Carrying out the projects in close connection to research groups provides synergy between research and education, and can improve the academic level of the projects. A further interesting dimension is accomplished when the projects run in iterations, requiring new groups of students to take over an already, partly developed complex system, and work incrementally on this system. The students are then faced with a very typical industrial situation. We advocate that students should be exposed to a mixture of "build from scratch" and "incremental" projects during the education.

Professional skills have long been perceived as lacking in junior engineers. Adopting a social realist theoretical framework of knowledge in practice, a hypothesis-based survey study of early career engineers' perceptions of engineering expertise was conducted. It investigated a professional skills readiness difference between initial career trajectories (hypothesis 1) through an analysis of engineering expertise perception, and whether this difference decreases over time as engineers mature (hypothesis 2). Both hypotheses were supported by three statistical tests which established the specific nature and size of this difference. Three themes were identified: Academic bias, Technical competence bias, and Rationality bias. Thematic analysis through the framework of these three themes indicates how context and complexity (Semantic dimension) and Knowledge and Knower (Specialisation dimension) were understood in practice. The three themes expressed challenges over these two dimensions in understanding Technical knowledge, Collaboration, and the Legitimate basis for practice, leading to recommendations for education and practice.