An interactive and pen-based simulator to enhance education and research in computer systems: An experience report

The active uses of simulators to facilitate and/or promote learners’ experience in many applications has significantly reshaped the latest educational technology or training methodologies in the past decades including the training of engineering students to understand the actual working mechanisms of specific engineering principles, or the military officers on tactic planning in a simulated combat environment. In many cases, it was clearly revealed that the appropriate uses of simulators not only avoids the indispensable costs of human lives or money lost in the hostile combat or investment field, but also effectively motivates and/or enhances the learners’ interests in the relevant fields of study, thus fueling significant impacts on their actual performance. However, many conventional simulators often require the users to input a formal specification file such as a script or program to specify about the simulation settings. Besides, even in many Window based simulators, the users may need to explicitly memorize about the meanings of various system variables and their proper settings before running a simulation to observe the imparted changes. All these unnecessary hassles will drastically reduce the interactivity of simulators, and also lower the users’ interests in using them. With the fast developing tablet and ultra-mobile PCs, we have seen ample opportunities of employing sophisticated pen-based computing technologies to improve the interactivity of simulators in order to enhance the learners’ experience to learn, reason or visualize with simulators in more effective ways. Therefore, in a recent pen-based simulator development project awarded by the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), we proposed to use the Microsoft digital ink library to support fast symbol/character recognition and the XML technologies to flexibly define various models of computer architectures so as to build an innovative and pen-based simulator for mobile computing devices. With pen-based or other inputs, our simulator allows the instructors/students to flexibly add or modify instructions that will generate live animations to facilitate interactive discussion for teaching undergraduate to postgraduate courses. Besides, our simulator has the full potential to support research on computer systems through visualization of new results generated out of new computational models or optimization strategies. A prototype of our simulator was completed and then released to all our Year-1 students for trials in the last month in which we collected some initial and positive feedbacks. A more vigorous evaluation was planned and would be conducted by the end of this spring semester. All in all, there are many interesting directions for further investigation including the integration of relevant course materials in the form of digital resources or pointers to online databases into our simulator, and a careful study of the pedagogical changes brought by our innovative and pen-based simulator.published_or_final_versio

Virtualization for cost-effective teaching of assembly language

A virtual system that emulates an ARM-based processor machine has been created to replace a traditional hardware-based system for teaching assembly language. The proposed virtual system integrates, in a single environment, all the development tools necessary to deliver introductory or advanced courses on modern assembly language programming. The virtual system runs a Linux operating system in either a graphical or console mode on a Windows or Linux host machine. No software licenses or extra hardware are required to use the virtual system, thus students are free to carry their own ARM emulator with them on a USB memory stick. Institutions adopting this, or a similar virtual system, can also benefit by reducing capital investment in hardware-based development kits and enable distance learning courses

Virtual machines In Education

Abstract To provide education and particularly providing practical educational experiences to the students in the field of computing and information technology related courses including practical experience in the field of Networking, System Administration, and Operating Systems needs a lot of resources for the institution. Because this level of technical education can’t be provided only theoretically, students also need hands-on practical experience, and providing practical experience faces a lot of problems such as lack of funding and physical space, risks and threats to the network environment when we attempt to provide real, physical laboratory for experiments. This problem can be solved by developing a virtual environment for delivering students practical education. In this report we will look into different technologies used for virtualization today and do a comparative study. We will also explore some of the institutions, which are using virtual machines based environment to provide students practical experience in the field of computing and information Technology. And see how peoples are getting benefits from using virtual machines. We present how networks of virtual machines can be beneficiary for computing and information technology student and institutions by providing necessary environment in virtual network

16 Cards to Get Into Computer Organization

This paper presents a novel educative activity for teaching computer architecture fundamentals. This activity is actually a game that uses 16 cards and involves about twenty active participant students. Executing this activity in the fi rst class of the course allows the studentin only 45 minutes to acquire the fundamental concepts of computer organization. The results of the surveys that evaluate the proposed activity together with the grades obtained by the students at the end of course corroborate the importance of the proposed game in the assimilation of more complex concepts in computer architecture.Universidad de Granada: Departamento de Arquitectura y Tecnología de Computadores; Vicerrectorado para la Garantía de la Calidad

OBVIAS: A visual interactive editor/assembler on the Corvus Concept Personal Workstation

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Kansas, Computer Science, 1984

Visualization of microprocessor execution in computer architecture courses: a case study at Kabul University

Magister Scientiae - MScComputer architecture and assembly language programming microprocessor execution are basic courses taught in every computer science department. Generally, however, students have difficulties in mastering many of the concepts in the courses, particularly students whose first language is not English. In addition to their difficulties in understanding the purpose of given instructions, students struggle to mentally visualize the data movement, control and processing operations. To address this problem, this research proposed a graphical visualization approach and investigated the visual illustrations of such concepts and instruction execution by implementing a graphical visualization simulator as a teaching aid. The graphical simulator developed during the course of this research was applied in a computer architecture course at Kabul University, Afghanistan. Results obtained from student evaluation of the simulator show significant levels of success using the visual simulation teaching aid. The results showed that improved learning was achieved, suggesting that this approach could be useful in other computer science departments in Afghanistan, and elsewhere where similar challenges are experienced.South Afric

A machine-independent microprogram development system

The aims of this project are twofold. They are firstly, to implement a microprogram development system that allows the programmer to write microcode for any microprogrammable machine, and secondly, to build a microprogrammable machine, incorporating the user friendliness of a simulator, while still providing the 'hands on' experience obtained actual hardware. Microprogram development involves a two stage process. The first step is to describe the target machine, using format descriptions and mnemonic-based template definitions. The second stage involves using the defined mnemonics to write the microcodes for the target machine. This includes an assembly phase to translate the mnemonics into the binary microinstructions. Three main components constitute the microprogrammable machine. The Arithmetic and Logic Unit (ALU) is built using chips from Advanced Micro Devices' Am29ØØ bit-slice family, the action of the Microprogram Control Unit (MCU) is simulated by software running on an IBM Personal Computer, and a section of the IBM PC's main memory acts as the Control Store (CS) for the system. The ALU is built on a prototyping card that plugs into one of the slots on the IBM PC's mother board. A hardware simulator program, that produces the effect of the ALU, has also been developed. A small assembly language has been developed using the system, to test the various functions of the system. A mini-assembler has also been written to facilitate assembly of the above language. A group of honours students at Rhodes University tested the microprogram development system. Their ideas and suggestions have been tabulated in this report and some of them have been used to enhance the system's performance. The concept of allowing 'inline' microinstructions in the macroprogram is also investigated in this report and a method of implementing this is shown