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Transistors to toys: teaching systems to freshmen

Published:17 March 2010Publication History

ABSTRACT

How should we introduce students to the art of system building, and when are students ready to start designing and building interesting systems? In this talk, I describe an experimental course at the University of Michigan that teaches systems to freshmen by having them conceive of, design, and build the hardware and software of a microprocessor-based educational toy. Students in this course build their own microprocessor on an FPGA using a hardware description language. They then write the complete software stack for their toy in assembly language, including device drivers for numerous I/O devices, a simple file system, a graphical user interface, digital audio processing, and application software. By building a substantial system involving hardware, system software, and application software, students gain an appreciation for the complexity and beauty of building computing systems.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Conferences
        VEE '10: Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS international conference on Virtual execution environments
        March 2010
        176 pages
        ISBN:9781605589107
        DOI:10.1145/1735997
        • cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
          ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 45, Issue 7
          VEE '10
          July 2010
          161 pages
          ISSN:0362-1340
          EISSN:1558-1160
          DOI:10.1145/1837854
          Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 2010 Copyright is held by the author/owner(s)

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 17 March 2010

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