Arduino for Teaching Embedded Systems. Are Computer Scientists and Engineering Educators Missing the Boat?

In this work, we look at the Arduino as a design platform for a course on embedded systems and ask the question, is the Arduino platform suitable for teaching computer engineers and computer scientists an embedded system course with? To examine this question, we describe a project based learning embedded system course that we have taught and identify which topics are covered in it compared to the IEEE/ACM recommendations. The major contention lies in the idea that students can access and use an open source community that is focused on getting things working as opposed to strictly looking at low-level technical aspects of embedded systems. Additionally, the presence of open source and reusable designs makes it difficult to identify what a student is doing. In our experience, using the Arduino exposes students to sufficient complexity and challenges for an embedded system course.