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Using a Real Bare Machine in a Project-Based Learning Environment for Teaching Computer Structure: An Analysis of the Implementation Following the Action Research Model
Abstract
The computer input/output (I/O) subsystem and its functioning are very abstract concepts that are difficult for undergraduate freshmen to understand. However, it is important that freshmen assimilate these lowlevel concepts if they are going to be taught about the operating systems (OS) working over that architecture layer, or working directly with them in embedded systems, real-time systems, or in the area of human computer interaction (HCI). This article describes the use of a game console (Nintendo® DS, NDS) in a project-based learning (PBL or PjBL) environment in which the design of a game is the basis of the project in order to encourage the students to get more involved with the computer I/O subsystem abstraction. A 4yr experience is reported in which the action research model (planning, acting, observing, and reflecting) has been followed. The general procedure for the 4yr and the specific characteristics and achieved results for each year are reported. The aim of the study was twofold: to assess the learning effectiveness of the active PjBL educational approach and some related factors, and to analyze the motivation toward the subject fostered by the game console. The first aim is analyzed using the scores achieved by the students; the second aim is analyzed via satisfaction questionnaires.
... Several recent research works have proposed computer science teaching student-centered [19][20][21][22] and supported by the PBL methodology [23]. Most of these experiences are done in advanced course subjects, although some interesting works related to the application of PBL in the first year of Computer Science studies can also be found [24][25][26]. These subjects make it easier to find a real application on which to base the project. ...
In higher education, it is usual to separate the theoretical contents from the practical ones and use teacher-centered methodologies. This fact makes students lose motivation due to the lack of connection with real professional tasks. Conversely, student-centered learning methods, like Project Based Learning (PBL) or Flipped Classroom, aim to integrate both theoretical and practical contents and to apply them on real-world problems, thus increasing the students’ motivation and involvement. These methodologies are usually applied in the last years of a degree, but it is difficult to find them in basic first-year subjects. The aim of this research consists in assessing the application of a PBL methodology in first-year subjects of Computer Engineering. This methodological change aims to achieve a significant improvement in the students’ learning achievement of the core subject Computer Fundamentals. The Project involved in the PBL proposal consists of developing a portable calculator. The performance of the PBL group is compared with that of other groups with a traditional, teacher-centered learning system. The evolution of the knowledge acquisition is determined by means of an initial evaluation and a final assessment after developing the Project. An exhaustive statistical analysis is performed so as to evaluate the PBL application. Quantitative results show a significant improvement in the experimental group marks, which increased by up to 20% compared to the control groups. As a conclusion, applying PBL and Flipped Classroom engaged students within the subject, thus achieving a deeper understanding of its theoretical concepts.
Reflecting on twenty years of educational research, we retrieved over 400 research article on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning (DL) techniques in teaching and learning. A computerised content analysis was conducted to examine how AI and DL research themes have evolved in major educational journals. By doing so, we seek to uncover the prominent keywords associated with AI-enabled pedagogical adaptation research in each decade, due to the discipline’s dynamism. By examining the major research themes and historical trends from 2000 to 2019, we demonstrate that, as advanced technologies in education evolve over time, some areas of research topics seem have stood the test of time, while some others have experienced peaks and valleys. More importantly, our analysis highlights the paradigm shifts and emergent trends that are gaining prominence in the field of educational research. For instance, the results suggest the decline in conventional tech-enabled instructional design research and the flourishing of student profiling models and learning analytics. Furthermore, this paper serves to raise awareness on the opportunities and challenges behind AI and DL for pedagogical adaptation and initiate a dialogue.
Project and problem-based learning (PBL) has been widely recognised as an active, collaborative, cumulative and integrative learning approach that engages learners, motivates team creativity and centres on practical education. On the other hand, traditional lecture-tutorial teaching is often criticised for being a passive, surface learning and exam-focused approach. In spite of these evidence-based observations and claims over the years, the traditional lecture-tutorial teaching approach still dominates as the preferred teaching approach at Australian universities. This study sets up a control environment to compare these two teaching and learning approaches by analysing data from students' actual performance, course evaluation and expectation in two large undergraduate engineering courses in 2009 and 2010. The evidence reported in this study is broadly interesting in that both courses were taught by the same teaching staff using two entirely different learning and teaching approaches to the same cohort of students in the same semester within the same degree program. The analysis shows that there are significant differences between the students' actual performance, course evaluation and their expectation. Such conflicting differences may be some of the reasons that may negatively impact teaching staff deterring them from switching to PBL from traditional lecture-tutorial teaching.
Problem- or project-based teaching-learning experiences (typically “PBL” or “PjBL”) have enormous benefits but also certain limitations and difficulties that have been analysed in this work with the purpose of setting some standard guidelines that may help to enhance the results of this kind of teaching experiences. A systematic, prioritised analysis of forty factors that influence this type of experiences, and affect the planning, organisation, development and assessment stages, has enabled us to find and formulate nine problems we deem to be major ones and which are usually repeated, particularly in machine and product development related experiences in the area of Mechanical Engineering. Having selected such most typical problems, we have then established causal relationships by taking account of the methodology involved, of the available resources, of the teachers in charge of the experience and of the students taking part in it. This has helped us to find and put forward different solutions and to discuss their effects while bearing in mind our team’s experience and the information from the studies carried out by teaching staff from other universities.
This paper surveys how the computer input/output (I/O) subsystem is taught in introductory undergraduate courses. It is important to study the educational process of the computer I/O subsystem because, in the curricula recommendations, it is considered a core topic in the area of knowledge of computer architecture and organization (CAO). It is also a basic knowledge to be acquired in order to work in areas such as human–computer interaction (HCI) or embedded systems. Examination questions, course syllabi, and textbooks were analyzed to identify which teaching approaches are being used. Individuals teaching the I/O subsystem could choose between the options explained here, according to their intended learning outcomes. In addition, a literature survey was conducted on the development and use of tools to improve student understanding of I/O and to make the topic less abstract and more attractive. A goal is to indicate to computing education researchers that the majority of the literature reports experiences in developing or using different resources or educational methodologies, but that these are not based on a theory of learning.
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E. Larraza-Mendiluze, N. Garay-Vitoria. 2014. Approaches and tools used to teach the computer input/output subsystem: A survey. IEEE Transactions on Education. In Press.
DOI: 10.1109/TE.2014.2310711
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6777580&sortType%3Dasc_p_Sequence%26filter%3DAND%28p_IS_Number%3A4358717%29
The Input/Output topic is mandatory in the Computer Architecture branch of the computing curricula. However, in our experience it is a rather complex topic for the students to understand.
This paper presents the process followed to analyze the concept maps built by the students at the end of the "Computer Structure" subject, in the second semester of the degree course.
The analysis process is explained because we had to adapt the software used in other disciplines to our needs. Merging all the concept maps showed that some relationships were missing, some were very messy and others were very strong. Based on the results achieved, some points need to be reinforced during the learning process.
The input/output (I/O) subsystem is an important topic within computer architecture (CA) because it determines how the computer interacts with its environment. For this reason, computer scientists and engineers must understand how the computer manages this interaction, which is usually taught in introductory CA courses. Of course, there are many different styles of teaching, ranging from purely theoretical to completely practical. The CA course considered in this paper has already applied a practical approach for some time. For the I/O subsystem, students must be able to describe what polling and interrupts are and handle them through low-level programming. However, programming at this level in operating system (OS)-driven computers is not possible without being familiar with the kernel and drivers, which is not usually the case for students in an introductory course. Fortunately, there are many bare and specialized embedded systems around that are not OS-driven. In this proposal, the Nintendo DS (NDS) console was used in a classroom setting. It proved to be an appropriate infrastructure for developing attractive and engaging projects and was useful in providing a better understanding of the mechanisms related to the I/O subsystem. At the same time, the teaching methods were altered to make the transition from classical, passive, lecture-based classes to an active project-based learning (PBL) approach. It has been a very rewarding experience to see students learning to control the NDS devices on their own. In addition to describing the implementation of the proposed changes in two subsequent school years, this paper also presents some data and conclusions.
Computer animation is a tool which nowadays is used in more and more fields. In this paper we describe the use of computer animation to support the learning of computer organization itself. MipsIt is a system consisting of a software development environment, a system and cache simulator and a highly flexible microarchitecture simulator used for pipeline studies. It has been in use for several years now and constitutes an important tool in the education at Lund University and KTH, Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
This paper is a guide to the effective design and management of team assignments in a college classroom where little class time is available for instruction on teaming skills. Topics discussed include forming teams, helping them become effective, and using peer ratings to adjust team grades for individual performance. A Frequently Asked Questions section offers suggestions for dealing with several problems that commonly arise with student teams, and forms and handouts are provided to assist in team formation and management.
Students learn better when they both hear and do. In computer architecture courses “doing” can be difficult in small schools without hardware laboratories hosted by computer engineering, electrical engineering, or similar departments. Software solutions exist. Our success with George Mills' Multimedia Logic (MML) is the focus of this paper. MML provides a graphical computer architecture solution with convenient I/O support and the ability to build and emulate a variety of computer designs. It has proven highly motivational to upper division computer science students designing and constructing emulated computers. Student projects resulted in excellent student understanding of the detailed inner workings of computers. Students also developed better teamwork skills and produced useful training aids for the lower division computer organization class. Designs implemented include 8 bit and 16 bit von Neumann and Harvard architectures, from single cycle to 12 cycle instructions. Issues resolved during the learning process include timing, initialization, instruction set architecture, and I/O and assembler design. We discuss pedagogical issues involved in using MML to implement instructor and student computer designs. MML is compared to using a hardware-based Intel 8085 microprocessor basic systems course.
DLSim 3 is a GUI-based digital logic simulator designed for use in Computer Organization and Architecture courses. Its key features are support for abstraction (allowing subcircuits to be abstracted as black boxes) and extensibility (allowing new circuit elements to be created as Java plug-ins). These features make DLSim 3 suitable for use at all levels of Computer Organization study. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the use of DLSim 3 at the system architecture level. We introduce DLSys, a collection of DLSim 3 circuits and plug-ins intended for use in the design and simulation of single-and multiple-CPU computer systems.
This paper explores what students taking an international project-based course in computer systems strive to learn. Through empirical, phenomenographic work we have identified three different motives that the students strive for: academic achievement; project and team working capacity; and social competence. What a student strives to learn largely influence the nature of her or his learning. Thus, the students can be thought of as taking different courses. Furthermore, the three motives can be experienced in different ways which can be more or less fruitful depending on what a student tries to achieve. We argue that it is important for a teacher to be aware of the variation in what the students want to learn, and to teach in a way that is cognizant of this spectrum of student goals.
The IEEE/Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computing Curricula and the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) Evaluation Criteria 2000 emphasize the use of recurrent concepts and system design/evaluation through projects and case studies in the curriculum of Computer and Electrical Engineering. In addition, efficient teamwork, autonomy, and initiative are commonly required qualifications for a professional in this field. Project-based learning approaches that require the students to handle realistic case studies are adequate to pursue these objectives. However, these pedagogical approaches tend to be rejected because they promote deep learning but focus on a restricted set of concepts, whereas many engineering curricula require a broad range of concepts to be covered in each course. The introduction of multiple case studies carried out simultaneously in the same course by different teams of students can broaden the set of concepts studied, but collaboration at different levels must be strongly enforced to achieve effective learning. This paper describes a multiple-case-study project design that has been applied to a computer architecture course for four years. After systematically evaluating the experience, the authors conclude that students achieve a deep learning of the concepts required in their own case study, while they are able to generalize their knowledge to case studies of different characteristics from those considered during the course. Furthermore, a number of collaborative skills and attitudes are developed as a consequence of the proposed environment based on multiple levels of collaboration.
Ant-32 is a new processor architecture designed specifically to address the pedagogical needs of teaching many subjects, including assembly language programming, machine architecture, compilers, operating systems, and VLSI design. This paper discusses our motivation for creating Ant-32 and the philosophy we used to guide our design decisions and gives a high-level description of the resulting design.
This paper describes a new GUI-based tool to teach undergraduate students to design their own CPUs. The tool was purpose-built to teach a wide range of computer organization topics, including digital logic, instruction set encoding, datapath and control units, and pipelining. A datapath builder allows microarchitecture building blocks, such as registers, ALUs, and multiplexors, to be laid out, wired together, and simulated. A control builder allows students to develop control states and microinstructions for the datapath. Both units are integrated with a full PC emulator, allowing student-designed processors to use emulated devices, such as drives, video, and I/O ports. A tutorial teaches students to use the simulator to build a pipelined RISC processor.
The four major theoretical orientations to cooperation and competition are cognitive development, behavioral learning, social cognitive, and social interdependence. Of the four, social interdependence theory has generated the most research and applications. The basic premise of social interdependence theory is that the type of interdependence structured in a situation determines how individuals interact with each other which, in turn, determines outcomes. The hundreds of studies that have been conducted indicate that cooperation, compared with competitive and individualistic efforts, tends to result in higher achievement and productivity, more positive interpersonal relationships, and greater psychological health.
Reviews the book, Cooperative Learning: Critical Thinking and Collaboration Across the Curriculum by Dennis M. Adams and Mary E. Hamm (see record 1990-97476-000 ). Adams and Hamm have written one of the latest books encouraging teachers to begin using cooperative learning. Adams and Hamm have put together an interesting and useful book for teachers. Broad generations, with quotes from both popular and scholarly sources interspersed, are used to highlight the conclusion that cooperative learning is an important instructional procedure. The authors build a case that cooperative learning should be used because of its relevance to work, citizenship, and critical thinking. They present a rationale for using cooperative learning in language arts, science and mathematics, mainstreaming, and computer-assisted instruction. They give practical suggestions and examples of how to do so. This combination of why and how may be especially helpful and interesting to teachers. Although teachers will find the book interesting, it falls somewhat short of its aims. The book is aimed at being a practical guide to issues, ideas, trends, and instructional procedures for structuring .cooperative learning. Too little practical advice is given to help teachers get started with (and sustain) cooperative learning in their classrooms. The book is more a series of essays with practical suggestions added. Finally, the price of the book seems high for its number of pages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Action research has been recognised for its breadth as a field of research practice and its depth as a discourse of theoretical insight. It does not have one neat, widely accepted definition. Points to some reasons for the difficulty of formulating a generally accepted definition of action research, and argues why action research should not be confined but should be both clarified for communication and open for development. The discussion stems from a working definition developed with participants in an international symposium that serves as a classic definition of action research. Presents several alternative approaches to resolution and argues for a judicious mix of pragmatism and flexibility in approaching the definition issue.
When instructors learn about participatory learning strategies such as cooperative, active, problem-based, or team-based learning, often the reaction is something along the lines of "sounds great but it would not work in my class--with such an approach I could not cover the required volume of material." We are pleased to report, via this paper, that this is not necessarily the case. With some retraining on the part of the instructor, as well as the students, a significant initial investment on the part of the instructor, the incorporation of tools that support the learning process, and a CQI (continuous quality improvement) process in place, it does work.
This paper describes a new graphical computer simulator developed for computer organization students. Unlike other teaching simulators, our simulator faithfully models a complete personal computer, including an i386 processor, physical memory, I/O ports, floppy and hard disks, interrupts, timers, and a serial port. It is capable of running PC software such as FreeDOS, Windows, and Minix, and can run as a Java applet. Graphical user interfaces allow students to view and modify the processor, memory, disks, and hardware devices at runtime. The simulator includes a processor development utility that allows students to design their own datapath and control units, and run their custom processor alongside the x86 processor. The paper describes labs where students use the simulator to write x86 assembly programs, device drivers, hardware controllers; and design both simple and pipelined processors.
The Nexos Project is a joint effort at Marquette Univer-sity (MU) and University of Buffalo (UB) to build cur-riculum materials and a supporting experimental laboratory for hands-on projects in embedded systems courses. Our approach focuses on inexpensive, flexible, commodity em-bedded hardware, (the Linksys WRT54GL wireless router,) freely available development and debugging tools, and a fresh implementation of a classic operating system that is now ideal for embedded system exploration. The prototype laboratory environment is being used in multiple courses at our respective Universities, with excellent results. We re-port on the infrastructure we have developed, the goals and content of our initial course offerings at both schools, and an evaluation of our success thus far.
This paper describes a series of exercises and assignments suggested for an introductory computer organization or computer architecture course. The primary objective of these exercises is to engage a class of students by introducing the practical, hands- on application of assembling a computer by selecting or purchasing individual components. While the ideal implementation involves the purchasing and assembling of components, various alternatives will be presented that do not require any additional funds to be secured.
At Georgia Tech, since the Fall of 1999, we have been teaching a first course in systems that represents a radical departure from the usual stovepipe model of teaching computer architecture and operating systems. By making this course a required one for CS majors in their sophomore year, we have accomplished several goals the most important of which is the opportunity for students to pursue deeper exposure to systems in their junior and senior years, through additional courses and research, if they so choose. The pedagogical style embodied in this course fosters a good understanding of the symbiotic relationship between hardware and software for the students early on in their undergraduate experience.
The ubiquity of personal computational devices in the lives of today's students presents a mean- ingful context for courses in computer organization beyond the general-purpose or imaginary processors routinely used. This article presents results of a comparative study examining student performance in a conventional organization course and in one that has been contextualized using a personal gaming platform as the pedagogical architecture. We find minimal differences in student learning but significant motivation and engagement gains for those in the contextualized course. Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.3.2 (Computers and Education): Computer and Infor- mation Science Education—Computer Science Education; Curriculum; C.1.0 (Processor Archi-
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