O ensino de Arquitectura de Computadores usando o Paradigma LMC: construindo um novo simulador edu.LMC
Authors
Abstract
The teaching-learning problematic related with the utilization of the Simulation and of the Information Technologies applied to the Computer Architecture is a subject whose expression, in what concerns the research in Portugal, is few significant. Matching the Computer Architecture and the target public that we intended to involve ' students of the licentiate degree in Management Computer, LDMC of a polytechnic institution the projects and contributions origin in this domain reduce even more. These Thesis and the edu.LMC application, educative.Little Man Computer, are specially directed to this learning context, in order to enable the utilization of a LMC simulator to these students, specially conceived to them, with their active contribute and evaluation and which presents itself as an 'entityâ? whose lifetime and actualization does not cease in this project.The genesis of this work is based on the involvement of the LDMC Computer Architecture discipline, with students form Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração de Coimbra, ISCAC,: in our point of view there is no sense or feeling in investigation projects on Education that were not deeply related with the daily work as well as with the faces and contexts of the real students. Besides, to assure that this project did not cease in the achieved knowledge in this discipline was another bet. The interconnection and the transversality between knowledge, contents and disciplines, often without effective practical results, namely in the case of high education, it was something that we really intended to explore. In that sense, the Computer Architecture allows the topics approaching nearly always related with Algorithms, Programming, Operating Systems and Computer Networks among other, structuring areas of any Computer licentiate degree curriculum. The opportunity to explore that connections (even if choosing a spectre that we could evaluate and not a dispersion cause in the project), preparing them for C Programming (because it is the language that the students are learning and because it includes concepts that are not simple to learn' the pointer concept, for instance, is one of the most complex and can be explored by the use of the edu.LMC), it was a purpose that we couldn't loose a sight of. Thus, this project begun in 2001, with theoretical approaches to the LMC Paradigm, relating the way how the students programmed with LMC and doing the parallelism with Algorithmic and C Language Programming; it performed in a way to use a Simulator that allowed the students active comprehension of its programmes by the use of LMC instructions; it expanded to other LMC simulators analysis when we realise that the students demands were beyond the tool in use; it rose with the creation of a new simulator, the edu.LMC, that we expect to be an agglutinating of the noticed good practice and of the student's exigency level; it had been concluded with the simulator evaluation which has ensued a new version of the application. We intended that, through the active contribution of these and other students, the edu.LMC develop to a tool with a large application spectre to other learning communities and to other publics that gaze themselves in its applicability and that could be able to answer to the challenges and exigencies that it would be imposed to. All that without lose sight of a main purpose: to render the edu.LMC a tool pedagogically adequate to the basic concepts learning of Computers Architecture and Programming, in a low-level language.