Project-based Activities to Introduce Hardware in a Software-focused Course

This workshop introduces attendees to the low-level components used in the design of computer hardware, allowing them to experiment with the hardware-software interface. Attendees explore hands-on experiments that are designed for students unlikely to encounter hardware topics in their course of study. These experiments are offered in bridge courses of a graduate program enrolling students without a Computer Science background at Northeastern University (the Align MSCS Program). The workshop consists of 3 groupings of hardware experiments. In one grouping, attendees use breadboarding to construct digital circuits. Transistors and resistors are used to design logic gates; then logic gates are used to design an arithmetic circuit (Half Adder); finally, two Half Adders with an OR gate are cascaded to build a larger adder. In the second grouping, attendees explore the interface between hardware and software, making software concepts tangible. Changing a bit from 0 to 1 in software causes a voltage change on a pin, causing light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to light. Operations executed on a Pico microcontroller illustrate programming concepts like ASCII representation and data structures. Additional Python constructs enable the implementation of counters and games. In the third grouping, attendees write C code to realize Linked list, Tree, and Graph implementations on Raspberry Pi (RSPi). These C programs enable hardware components by activating the hardware I/O ports of RSPi.