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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Software tools in education became popular since the widespread of personal computers. Engineering
courses lead the way in this development and these tools became almost a standard. Engineering
graduates are familiar with numerical analysis tools but also with simulators (e.g. electronic circuits),
computer assisted design tools and others, depending on the degree.
One of the main problems with these tools is when and how to start use them so that they can be
beneficial to students and not mere substitutes for potentially difficult calculations or design. In this
paper a software tool to be used by first year students in electronics/electricity courses is presented.
The growing acknowledgement and acceptance of open source software lead to the choice of an open
source software tool – Scilab, which is a numerical analysis tool – to develop a toolbox. The toolbox
was developed to be used as standalone or integrated in an e-learning platform. The e-learning
platform used was Moodle.
The first approach was to assess the mathematical skills necessary to solve all the problems related to
electronics and electricity courses.
Analysing the existing circuit simulators software tools, it is clear that even though they are very
helpful by showing the end result they are not so effective in the process of the students studying and
self learning since they show results but not intermediate steps which are crucial in problems that
involve derivatives or integrals. Also, they are not very effective in obtaining graphical results that
could be used to elaborate reports and for an overall better comprehension of the results.
The developed tool was based on the numerical analysis software Scilab and is a toolbox that gives
their users the opportunity to obtain the end results of a circuit analysis but also the expressions
obtained when derivative and integrals calculations, plot signals, obtain vector diagrams, etc. The
toolbox runs entirely in the Moodle web platform and provides the same results as the standalone
application. The students can use the toolbox through the web platform (in computers where they don't
have installation privileges) or in their personal computers by installing both the Scilab software and
the toolbox. This approach was designed for first year students from all engineering degrees that have
electronics/electricity courses in their curricula.
Description
Keywords
Numerical analysis Scilab electronics toolbox E-learning