Project Overview
Here is our executive summary from our proposal to Sun Technologies:
"Awareness of open source software communities at Oregon State University has rapidly increased in the last few years due to the appealing benefits of open source development, promotion by the Linux User Group, and the installation of the Open Source Lab near campus. As a result, new ways for students to get involved in open source development are sought after.
Major requirements for Electrical and Computer Engineers (ECE) dictate that an ECE student must take specific courses from the Computer Science (CS) department. In these synthesis classes, ECE students often feel as if the topics covered aren’t applicable to their career goals since high-level languages, such as Java, are often not used when dealing with low-level design.
The Sun SPOT Open Grant Program offers a unique solution. Sun SPOTs could be used to instill excitement in ECE students taking CS courses through relevant curriculum involving the SPOTs, and also give experience with lower-level functionality to CS students. Additionally, using Sun SPOTs could give students more opportunities to interface with the open source community.
While there are no official plans to embed new technology into the CS department’s curriculum, there have been inquiries into establishing a learning platform much like the highly successful TekBots® used in the ECE curriculum. All ECE students purchase a TekBot, which they build on as they progress through their courses. This helps students develop understanding on how the courses are interrelated and give them hands-on experience with the actual theories discussed in the courses. Sun SPOTs could possibly take up this role in the CS department, given a good role model. We want to investigate the possibilities."
In short, we'd like to create a framework on which to build future curriculum. Plans are already being made to possibly implement a similar device still in production that runs C on the processer (without an OS, like the SunSPOT) for a price much less than SunSPOTs. Until that technology is fully developed, we will lay a foundation that can be easily transferred to a new platform when the technology becomes available.
Click here to get a grasp of our development environment.
