Software Optimization for Improving Student Motivation in a Computer Architecture Course

This paper presents a learning activity designed to improve student motivation towards learning certain topics in computer architecture, particularly assembly-level machine organization. This activity applies a pedagogical method suitable for computer architecture courses. The method improves motivation by allowing students to verify by themselves, on real platforms, that they can apply their architecture knowledge to improve software performance and also by showing them the improvements achieved in complete applications. The activity is compared to other such activities based on different motivation and learning techniques.