A practical approach to hardware empathy for software engineering students

Students being trained specifically as software engineers require an abstract picture of hardware operation which is not only appropriate to programming, but which allows them to appreciate the relationship between hardware, software, and system performance. There are approaches to assembly language teaching that can fulfil the former requirement, but it is found that approaches to the latter normally involve more electronics understanding than is appropriate for software engineering students. The paper describes a course of practical work on which students can build an understanding of the relationship between hardware operation and both high- and low-level software, without knowledge of electronics. It is believed that this, complemented by suitable assembly language teaching, provides the students with a useful, valid, and reasonably general picture of the relationship between hardware and software