Introducing Digital System Design to High School Students

Teaching methodology for high school students is in many ways different from teaching at the university level. This paper presents an approach to teaching introductory digital system design to high school students of ages 17-18. Students learn the basics of the functionality of digital system components with the goal of understanding the architecture of a simple hypothetical processor. This topic goes beyond the general high school curriculum in Serbia and is targeted at students in classes with a special curriculum for mathematics and computer science subjects. The class covered the following main topics: 1) fundamentals of combinational and sequential circuit design and 2) architecture and design of a simple processor. Practical sessions were performed using a simulator, such that each student designed their own instance of a processor with a simple set of instructions. The classes were evaluated using the exit surveys which showed that students widely accepted the simulator and learning material and were excited to experience and complete the design of a processor. This teaching experience provided additional motivation for the development of more learning materials in computer science and engineering for pre-university education.