CERN Accelerating science

Teaching has been a major concern during my career at CERN and it was my wish to end my career as a lecturer at a university in the developing world. CERN has collaborations with institutes in many countries around the globe, except countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. … and since I have friends in Ghana, why not at the University of Cape Coast (UCC)?

With several months of SLS leave before my retirement I left for Ghana in September for a 4 months, 1 semester teaching assignment at the School of Agriculture and Natural Sciences in the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology.

Having worked in the Beam Instrumentation group at CERN, reading out sensors did not have too many secrets for me and together with my colleagues at UCC we decided of a course on Embedded Systems where small Internet enabled devices read different types of sensors (temperature, humidity, light intensity …) or control devices like leds, relays, motors etc.

In addition I had a group of students working on a simple obstacle avoiding robot or a robot whose movement can be controlled via BlueTooth.

The course consisted of formal lecture with a big component of hands-on exercises. This presentation will explain the hardware choices made, show the documentation system and give an overview over the lecture material for the embedded systems course with some anecdotes of my stay thrown in. An outlook of future collaboration with UCC is also given.