Self-practicing of Logic Circuits through Mobile Devices: Lecturers’ and Students’ Perceptions

Electronic devices are widely-used in modern life, and among the multitude of application possibilities, educational technology in order to facilitate learning and practicing becomes more and more important. Portable devices such as smartphones and tablet PCs make learning and teaching materials more accessible to students and lecturers. Although there already exists a large number of mobile-based learning applications, there is still a lack of studies which investigate lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of mobile-based learning environments. These issues are investigated in this paper. In order to ascertain perceptions of students and lecturers, a web-based questionnaire study was conducted. Two objectives were pursued: (i) to investigate lecturers’ and students’ perceptions of improvements in technical subjects through self-practicing with mobile devices, and (ii) to demonstrate common difficulties of students in the learning and practicing process in a core subject for computer science students, namely logic circuits and hardware description languages (HDL). The results showed that according to the lecturers’ view, a substantial number of students experience difficulties with logic circuits and their implementation via HDL. Furthermore, the findings show that students who are interested in the field of logic circuits think positive of practicing on graphical and code view of logic circuits via mobile devices.