Teaching Digital Design to Computing Science Students in a Single Academic Term

José Nelson Amaral, Paul Berube, Paras Mehta

How should digital design be taught to Computing Science students in a single one-semester course? This paper advocates the use of state of the art design tools and programmable devices and presents a series of laboratory exercises to help students learn digital logic. Each exercise introduces new concepts and produces the complete design of a stand\-alone apparatus that is fun and interesting to use. These exercises lead to the most challenging capstone designs for a single semester course of which the authors are aware. Fast progress is made possible by providing students with pre-designed input/output modules. Student feedback demonstrates that the students approve this methodology. An extensive set of slides, support teaching material, and lab exercises are freely available for downloading.

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