Work in progress — Eliciting intuitive understandings of binary operations in a first course on computer organization

This paper describes continuations to the reform of a sophomore-level course in computer organization for our Computer Science BS curriculum, where, Java and integrated IDEs have been adopted as the only language and development environments used in the first three semesters of study. A major objective of our approach is the minimization of cognitive overload, through the incremental introduction of the concepts using carefully designed sequences of concrete examples that provide intuition prior to the commencement of formal analysis. In this paper, we examine approaches for teaching students a variety of techniques for manipulating binary numeric encodings designed to provide mathematical insights rather than rely upon an expectation of student´s mathematical maturity.