Use of Constructivism and Collaborative Teaching in an ILP Processors Course

Simulators are widely used to teach instruction level parallelism (ILP) topics. A simulator called SIMDE, which combines the superscalar and very long instruction word (VLIW) approaches to ILP processors in a single environment, has been developed. SIMDE has been validated and improved using feedback from students during two academic years. Although the simulator is a valuable tool in and of itself, this paper goes one step beyond by using SIMDE with an educational methodology based on constructivism and collaborative learning. This methodology has been applied in a computer architecture course that uses the Moodle platform as a framework for collaboration between students and teachers