Scotty in the Engine Room - A Game to Help Learn Digital System Design

Peter Jamieson

Abstract

Engineering education uses games and competition including events such as robotic competitions, egg drops, pumpkin launches, and paper airplane design to help educate students in design projects. In electrical and computer engineering, robotic competitions tend to dominate the landscape in the form of robot soccer and autonomous vehicle navigation. Though these activities are great for pushing an engineer to greater levels of skill and knowledge they require, for the most part, at least two or three years of education (with the exception of Lego Mindstorm robotics). In this work, I have created a game framework in digital hardware that will allow second year students to experience competitive engineering hardware design and real-time problem solving using a StarTrek model where the engineer solves problems in and for battle. This game includes digital hardware design on a development board, which controls a team's space ship to battle an opposing ship. The goals of this framework are to improve the success rate of student projects in the second year and to provide additional learning benefits.