Effective Use of Embedded Platforms in the Development of Experiments for Enhancing the Interests of STEAM Students in Mexico

Introduction

In México, few students are interested in careers related to STEAM. This can be attributed to a plethora of factors, which include the social pressure for studying traditional careers related to social-management fields and to the lack of motivation offered by the professors in basic education, or the need for enhancing technical and scientific abilities of population. Accordingly, it is sought to generate interest in STEAM-rated topics since early education. At the same time, it is important to consider that, the students of basic education start to lose interest in STEAM based topics at the end of that learning process. As a consequence, when students arrive at a more advanced stage in their education, it becomes a challenge for instructors to maintain motivation in topics that are “traditionally” difficult or challenging, in particular, science, technology and mathematics courses (Dickerson, Eckhoff, Stewart, Chappell, & Hathcock, 2014; Wegner, Strehlke, & Weber, 2014).

Motivation from professor to student, proper planning of experiments and choice of technological platforms are some the main factors, which enhance the interest of students on STEAM related topics (Kärkkäinen & Vincent-Lancrin 2013). This is particularly true for embedded platforms such as Arduino, ESP32 and PSOC, among others that have gone through shortage; this can be attributed to the breakdown of supply chains related to electronic components. For these reasons, there is an increase in the relevance of reinvention regarding the experiments of friendly platforms such as Arduino; this with the aim for finding the potential of these technologies, while the students learn novel functions and applications of the device, that in some cases, are omitted in a typical syllabus. The absence of such topics can be attributed either to a reduced teaching time, or a lack of specialization from the professors (Tzagaraki, E., Papadakis, S., Kalogiannakis, M. 2022). Another adverse factor is the excessive use of predetermined libraries, which results in poor diversity of projects from students. As a result, it is common that there is a repetition or reproduction in the degree of complexity exhibited by previous students. Some of these cases include the lack of exploitation of tools such as diverse types of counters, interruption sources by software or hardware, an appropriate use of averaged data, or the use of real-time clocks. This last aspect can be attributed to a disconnection between data acquisition and a time-framework, which makes further analysis difficult. In addition, the interaction of user with system’s input/output depends on interaction methods with the system, i.e. keyboards, screens or commands from a PC. Also, even when the use of embedded systems is focused on energetic efficiency, in most cases the use of sleep/wake-up instructions are unknown by the user, and with this, valuable opportunities for autonomy, beyond a didactic experiment, are lost.

Within such issues, there is the special case of the strategies carried out during the pandemic to perform some experiments at home, when access to laboratories that had the ideal equipment for curricular practices was not possible (Kinnula et al. 2021). What was done for students who begin in engineering? Some strategies mainly on the subjects of electricity and in the principles of electronic measurements are presented. The use of open-source hardware and software might be a lifesaver during the confinement condition at home, but although the software libraries work and have been tested by the community, they may not contemplate all the needs demanded by a specific application. Mastering the Arduino tools and libraries for transferring data between devices requires considering the latency of the devices involved.

Hence, this work aims to review and compare the best practices in these topics, while the information is presented in a friendly way for students that are exploring functions beyond available digital platforms.