Reconfigurable devices based experimentation supporting teaching introductory digital systems

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted with students from two courses in the area of digital systems design that took place at the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Nova University of Lisbon during the first semester of the academic year of 2016/2017. One of the courses is at the introductory level and the other at the intermediate/advanced level, playing an importance role for teaching embedded and cyber-physical systems. In common, the two courses have an experimentation kit that contains a low-cost FPGA (Spartan-3 from Xilinx) that is made available to each group of students throughout the whole semester for the advanced digital systems course, or during the second half of the semester in the case of the introductory course. The survey attempted to perceive the degrees of importance acknowledge by students to different aspects of the infrastructure to support the digital systems laboratories, confirming the importance to have access to experimentation with physical devices even outside laboratory classes.