Nintendo Video Game

978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE Oc 39 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference W1J l he course he three cr asts eight rogrammin t was perc isciplines pplication oncepts f In gener oncepts th opic. Lect omework ections w ractice. ndividually uite aggres escription is the to establis s in an lines. G cts are d. Compu two lectur ssion. Ea weeks and freshmen e . Due to t he course, eived to h of MATL l, lecture re material s well as t ere concep for the lea its limited ive in orde target con ASEE or EG 101 , is as follo ering to Fir a founda of the used to view o present th as three w s and one l h module culminate AMMING gineering is devoted e fact that ve the br isciplines. f Comput B. Key les, arrays, d example is supple e smaller l ts are dir are requir ork but a imeframe, to culmin epts for the 1, the first t sequence t Year inte ion for th engineeri ted desi engineeri engineeri re develop ynthesis, a arning cen in the cou in a gro equence, o to compu ll engineeri as selected adest imp or nearly r Science lves fut rs MATL of each k ented throu ctly put i d to w e allowed he module te in a proj module. T tiers in Ed in ir ed er as ey er to is ct simul to sa its c timef the fa to lif impr P E comp to pr l final tion with s isfy variou us projects g of the O Station t hile the m re content, ame can ver, this d t that the s at college. final proj 08, student the final dent reacti hanced ca ense agree evant MA students a ac platform oreover, a ering majo vel of exp ting. Th the cours ence maki gramming. ure 1 – Fal ject – UA roject inv emi-realisti success have rang piloting d moonsca dule is suc the large e quite di fficulty is udents are Recent ch namics inc ct was don were allo roject wit n to the ch pus licens LAB func d faculty the cour vast majo have little g this mod When this piloting lves a movemen nd failure d from co at the Int lunar lan e. cessful at ficult for till largely nges to the previous individuall ed to wor significan A recen ionality av n the Win e encomp students h rity of the to no prog le the first act is coupl LAB modu raphical in order criterion. trol of a e 1) to rnational er on a elivering limited students. djusting ourse to fferings, . In fall as pairs positive campus ilable to ve with ramming d with a 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE Oc 39 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference W1J general aversion of non-com to programming, we felt there was a need to move beyond the traditional focus on “syntactic sugar” of MATLAB but still preserve the utility of MATLAB for later years of the students’ To that end, we iden tified recent work with the Nintendo Wiimote libraries as a potential new mechanism for teaching MATLAB content. The core idea would be that the Wiimote could both enhance lecture as well as act as an extended significant robustness albeit with limited accuracy. For the cost of the Figure 2 – Nintendo WiiMote 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE Oc 39 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference W1J approaches (undergraduate project at CMU) [16], and adaptations of other devices for motion input to the Wii (acceleration controller on IBM Figure 3 – Inverted Pendulum Application 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE Oc 39 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference W1J The connection API for the Wiimote is as follows: Attempt to connect to a default Wiimote. Check to make sure that the Wiimote is still connected. to the Wiimote. The Wiimote itself can be sampled for its state while (~isButtonPressed('HOME')) % x-acceleration Figure 4 – Example Code – Inverted Pendulum 978-1-4244-4714-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE Oc 39 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference W1J using only the keyboard. For the lecture, however, a special version was developed using the Wiilab software along with additional logic to