Work in progress - using a graphical programming language teach to microprocessor interfacing

At Eastern Connecticut State University we have designed our computer science program around the ACM Computing Curricula 2001 Computer Science. This is a fairly flexible guideline and permits distinctive solutions to the curriculum. Because we are a liberal arts institution and teach students in a computer science program, hardware courses present themselves as challenges to instructors. On one hand hardware courses expand our students abilities while on the other hand they challenged them because they are very different than software courses. We address this dilemma by using a graphical programming language. We use a similar approach developed by Jones, Lehrman, and Rogers (2002). Our situation differs from Jones, Lehrman, and Rogers (2002) in that we have a homogeneous student body of computer science majors. However, we have students that have both little and some hardware background. Hardware can be viewed as threatening for students with only a software background. Like Jones, Lehrman, and Rogers (2002), we use sound and music to motivate difficult computer science principles such as Nyquist´s sampling theorem, spectrum analysis, and FFTs. By permitting students to use their intuition, they are able to understand and see these principles in a non-threatening way. In fact, our approach becomes a motivating method for the class. Once we decided to use a graphical programming language, we needed to address four aspects of the course: 1) the laboratories; 2) the instructor´s teaching station; 3) course materials; 4) remote sharable stations. The paper describes these aspects of our course