The Arduino Platform and C Programming

As I was taking this class, I often wondered who the target audience was. Although the class has no listed prerequisites, I noticed a lot of engineering jargon being used without ever defining what it meant. I'm not sure that non-technical people would get much out of the lectures. On the other hand, the lectures were mostly at a superficial level, so I'm not sure that technical people would get much out of them either. The only topic that got a (somewhat) deep dive was serial communication, and it wasn't clear why; users of the Arduino don't need to understand it any more or less than any other aspect of how an Arduino works.

There were other issues. The programs we wrote had to be pasted into a submission form that removed all the carriage returns when you hit Save; I had to manually fix my program each time. Perhaps most frustratingly, you could follow the assignment instructions to the letter, but after you submitted you might find out that the grading criteria included other requirements. In one case people asked about it, and it turned out that the grading criteria were wrong, but they were never updated. My sense was that not much effort went into the creation of this course.