20 Spring / Printemps 2017 and a group of six instructors was formed: Dario Schor, Troy Denton, Frank Serafin, Matthew Sebastian, Matthew Woelk, and Benjamin Bergman—a combination of undergraduate and graduate students with previous embedded systems experience through courses, student group involvement, and their own projects. The team met a few times to try out the boards, developed a few examples, and noted common problems that participants might experience. In parallel, they secured funding from a few different sources including the IEEE Winnipeg Section, UofM Student Union, and the UofM Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering to cover the cost of food and advertising. The “Hands-On Embedded Systems” workshop was scheduled for Sunday, March 27, 2011 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in a classroom at the UofM. The cost of $20 per student included the hardware to take home, breakfast, snacks, and lunch. The 25 spots available filled up in less than 24 hours and a waiting list was created. The group consisted of electrical engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, physics, and computer science students ranging from first year through masters students. On the day of the workshop, the participants arrived, registered, and picked up their components. All participants were instructed to bring their own laptops or use one of the desktop computers from the student group. The first hour was dedicated to installing the development environment, soldering header pins onto the MSP430 boards, and eating some snacks. Already the activities were behind schedule. There were many different versions of Windows, MacOSX, and Linux operating systems to deal with, thus requiring longer to install the development tools. Furthermore, it was surprising to see how many students were soldering components for the first time. This is something that was not taken lightly, so the instructors spent some time going over safety procedures, showing what a good solder joint looks like, and guiding students through the process. The instructors took turns delivering content and helping students one- on-one. They started with a basic blinking LED example and moved through more complex material. The goal was to build a system that would connect all the boards from every participant together in a circle, such that they would receive an interrupt, blink an LED, and send a signal to trigger an interrupt for their neighbour’s board—much like watching people do a wave at a sporting event. This proved to be too ambitious and wrongly assumed everyone would complete all the exercises by the same time. The scheduled 3 p.m. end-time would come and go. The group was so immersed in the experience that they stayed an extra 2-3 hours working. The evening ended with a large pizza order for all of those that were still around for dinner. After the event, a survey was emailed to all participants and the results were very positive. There were some constructive comments to (i) reduce the amount of time associated with setting up the development environment, (ii) separating activities for audiences based on experience, (iii) adjusting the amount of content delivered to make the goals more achievable in the allotted time, (iv) improving the slides and making them available to students along with sample code to avoid re-typing unnecessary code, and (v) opening the event to non-UofM students. Overall the message was clear: the experiential learning objectives were met; and, most importantly, there was a yearning for more. The Workshop Fever that Followed The first workshop was not even finished and the group of attendees and instructors already began talking about the next phase. Wisely, the decision was to take time over the summer months to plan activities, develop material, and secure funding to improve the overall experience in future offerings. The team grew as we incorporated some attendees from the first event and other students who had lots of good ideas to contribute. Furthermore, there was an increased camaraderie and collaboration with other student groups including Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), UofM Amateur Radio Society (UMARS), and UofM Space Applications and Technology Society (UMSATS), who requested specific topics to be covered to help in their respective projects. From 2011 through 2016, there were more than 60 offerings of workshops using different development platforms including MSP430 [3], Arduino [4], and Raspberry Pi [5], and hosted by different venues around the city including the UofM, Red River College, the Winnipeg Public Library, and many high schools. In addition, there have been many collaborations with other organizations including WISE Kid-Netic Energy, UMARS, and UMSATS. Most workshops are now split into different sessions for beginner, intermediate, and advanced audiences with different prerequisite knowledge depending on the activities to be completed. The setup time has been reduced by pre-installing all the necessary tools in a computer lab where the workshop is being hosted and providing links to instructions to those wishing to install compilers on their personal computers. The team grew as we incorporated some attendees from the first event and other students who had lots of good ideas to contribute