Resumen de ParTec and KarnUMa – Digital tools as a help for freshman learning

Valentim Freitas, Antonio Gabriel Ravelo García, F. Morgado Dias

• Freshman students always present lower success rates than other levels of students. Digital systems is a course usually taught at first year stu- dents and its success rate is not very high. In this work we introduce three digi- tal tools to improve freshman learning designed for easy use and one of them is a tool for mobile terminals that can be used as a game. The first tool is ParTec and is used to implement and test the partition technique. This technique is used to eliminate redundant states in finite state machines. This is a repetitive task that students do not like to perform. The second tool is called KarnUMa and is used for simplifying logic functions through Karnaugh Maps. Simplifying logi- cal functions is a core task for this course and although students usually perform this task better than other tasks, it can still be improved. The third tool is a ver- sion of KarnUMa, designed for mobile devices. All the tools are available online for download and have been a helpful tool for students.