Research and development of microcontroller experiment instructional units and their effectiveness with industrial technology, electronic technology, and electrical engineering technology majors

The Motorola MC68HC11 microcontroller is one of the semiconductor achievements that offers various facilities in microprocessor control applications with no need for excessive external support in hardwares. This new product provides the flexibility, efficiency, economy, and simplicity for the designing job of the microprocessor control applications. This study was conducted to improve the current microprocessor teaching materials which are mostly out-of-date and expensive in conducting lab experiments, and to determine the relative effectiveness of the new microprocessor teaching materials. A set of seven explanatory lab experiments were designed and developed on the Motorola MC68HC11 microcontroller EVB (Evaluation Board), and students' learning achievement tests on implementing these set of experiments have been used to determine the effectiveness of the design as well as applications of the microcontroller.;Seven explanatory lab experiments were developed and designed according to the current literature reviews of microcontroller and several Industrial Technology microprocessor courses guidelines. The first four of these seven experiments were chosen as samples of students' design projects.;A pretest and posttest with matching statistical model was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the explanatory experiments in students learning achievements. The pretest and posttest scores were used in several statistical analyses to compute the significant difference between the two groups. The average days in completing a project were used to compute the differences between the two groups.;Results from analyses of the data did not reject the first hypothesis H;Recommendations for further studies are investigating larger samples from different colleges and universities, designing microcontroller applications at different course levels, applying the microcontroller features to robotics controls, pneumatic or hydraulic servo control, and investigating other higher level microcontrollers applications.