Pedagogical Innovation in Pandemic Times: The Experience of a Microprocessor Programming Course

The 2019/2020 school year will always be remembered for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in recent history, countries closed schools and forced instructors and students to quickly adjust to online classes. This sudden and forced shift to a method of teaching that was completely different from what we were used to presented several challenges and opportunities on a pedagogical level. In this paper we describe our experience as instructors in a course on microprocessor programming in the Master's Degree in Computer Science and Computing Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Our approach included changes to the assessment plan, which became more distributed, and improvements in communication between students and instructors through the use of Slack. We found that the changes introduced were not only very well received by students, but also resulted in the best exam attendance and average final grade in the last 10 years of the course's history.