Interdisciplinary Technical Exercises for Informatics Teacher Students

Abstract

More and more of today’s devices are electronic and software operated. Since they measure the signals of the real world and act as a result of processing, informatics is getting closer to interdisciplinary fields. The technology of everyday devices, automotive industry, Industry 4.0, Internet of Things (IoT) are based al-so on engineering, physics, electronics, biology and other fields besides informatics. Accordingly, the in-terdisciplinarity is important in education too, it is essential to teach related solutions of technology for the informatics teacher students since they will certainly need it during their teaching practice. Although the development of technology is still very rapid, the main principles of operation remain the same, so education should focus on this rather than on the teaching of a current software development environ-ment or hardware realization. Following this idea, we have worked out several laboratory exercises for our programme of informatics teacher students. During their work they construct some circuits, write the code and practice the fundamental methods of embedded software development. We report on how they could understand and learn the most important principles during working on an educational, a commer-cial, an industrial and a medical field related exercise. The associated experience-based learning helps sys-tematic understanding and development of creativity. Based on our experience, students are getting more self-confident by the use of modern technical systems, which we consider particularly important.