The question/answer-based computer game Age of Computers was introduced to replace traditional weekly paper exercises in a course in computer fundamentals in 2003. Questionnaire evaluations and observation of student behavior have indicated that the students found the game more motivating than paper exercises and that a majority of the students also perceived the game to have a higher learning effect than paper exercises or textbook reading. This paper reports on a controlled experiment to compare the learning effectiveness of game play with traditional paper exercises, as well as with textbook reading. The results indicated that with equal time being spent on the various learning activities, the effect of game play was only equal to that of the other activities, not better. Yet this result is promising enough, as the increased motivation means that students work harder in the course. Also, the results indicate that the game has potential for improvement, in particular with respect to its feedback on the more complicated questions.

Experimental Validation of the Learning Effect for a Pedagogical Game on Computer Fundamentals

CPU Sim 3.1 is an educational software package written in Java for use in CS3 courses. CPU Sim provides students an active learning environment in which they can design, modify, and compare various computer architectures at the register-transfer level and higher. They can run assembly language or machine language programs for those architectures through simulation. CPU Sim is a complete development environment, including dialog boxes for designing the CPU architecture, a text editor for editing assembly language programs, an assembler, several display windows for viewing the registers and RAMs during the execution of programs, and many debugging features such as the ability to step forward or backward during execution, inspecting and optionally changing the values in the registers and RAMs after each step. These features and suggested uses of CPU Sim in CS3 classes are discussed.

CPU Sim 3.1: A tool for simulating computer architectures for computer organization classes

Alfa-1 is a simulated computer designed for computer organization courses. Alfa-1 and its accompanying toolkit allow students to acquire practical insights into developing hardware by extending existing components. The DEVS formalism is used to model individual components and to integrate them into a hierarchy that describes the detailed behavior of different levels of a computer's architecture. We introduce Alfa-1 and the toolkit, show how to extend existing components, and describe how to use Alfa-1 for educational purposes. We also explain how to assemble, link, and execute applications and how to test new extensions usingthe testing tools.

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Using the Alfa-1 simulated processor for educational purposes

This paper discusses our rationale for teaching the fundamentals of computer architecture early in the computer science (CS) degree program. We also describe an active learning technique that we use to help make this material accessible to our introductory CS students.

Teaching computer architecture in introductory computing: why? and how?

Age of Computers is a web-based multi-player game for teaching computer fundamentals to undergraduate engineering students. The storyline of the game is linked to the historical periods (epochs) of computers, and the content is organized in rooms or places on a map where the player moves around to answer questions and solve puzzles. This paper reports on the usage of the game in a course with 250 undergraduate students. Both questionnaire surveys and observations of student behavior indicate that the game was positively received even if the students were obliged to use it in the context of the course. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 17: 167–179, 2009; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae20173

A compulsory yet motivating question/answer game to teach computer fundamentals

CPU SIM is an interactive low-level computer simulation package that runs on the Macintosh computer. Users of the package specify the details of the CPU to be simulated, including the register, i/o channels, main memory, the microinstruction set, machine instructions, and assembly language instructions. User can then create machine or assembly language programs using the built-in text editor and assembler and can run their programs in the simulator. It is possible to step through the execution of a program one machine instruction at a time. Also, users may choose to edit the contents of any component and then continue execution. The main window displays the state of the machine at every step. CPU Sim was chosen as “Best Engineering Software (Computer Science)” in the 1993 EDUCOM Higher Education Software and Curriculum Innovation Awards Program. It is currently being sold by Intellimation.

Dale Skrien

Papers

CPU Sim a computer simulator for use in an introductory computer organization-architecture class