A Visual Computer Simulator and its Applications to An ICT-based Higher Education

A visual computer simulator, called "VisuSim", has been developed and applied to real education for Computer Science at Kagawa University. It is one of educational tools associated with lectures on computer architecture and assembly programming. The simulator is written in the pure Java programming language, executed in several kinds of environment (free for types of OS and CPU) and invoked in the applet mode as well as in the stand-alone one. Typical usages of our simulator are two-fold. Teachers employ our simulator, "VisuSim" to demonstrate visually how a computer processes its program. Students use the simulators in class or access our Website, download "VisuSim", and invoke applet-based "VisuSim" on their browsers. After receiving feedback from users, we have provided communication support facility as a new function of "VisuSim". With such a communication facility, can send their programs, ask questions on them to their classmates and the classmates can test received programs with their "VisuSim" to think together about the questions