Teaching with A Hierarchically Structured Digital Systems Laboratory

"Learning by doing" has been a strong tradition at Carnegie-Mellon University. In addition to the usual class discussion periods, students at CMU are asked to devote a considerable amount of time to project work, especialy including laboratory projects. Solving practical, applied problems that go beyond the range of classroom or laboratory exercises is an important component of students\´ education -that will better prepare them for both industrial and academic careers. This article describes a digital systems laboratory in the Electrical Engineering Department at CMU that implements such a learning-by-doing philosophy in the computer engineering area.