Undergraduate assembly language instruction sweetened with the raspberry pi

Abstract

It is widely recognized that motivating students in an undergraduate assembly language course is a tremendous challenge, principally because of the perception that the subject matter is both difficult and tedious. The Raspberry Pi is a small and inexpensive single-board computer that was created for educational purposes, and in this paper we describe how we successfully incorporated this device into the curriculum of an undergraduate assembly language course. We describe, in detail, the objectives for this course and the dedicated lab that uses the Raspberry Pi as an embedded device, and then evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings (obtained by exploring changes in student performance and examining the results of an engagement/enjoyment survey) strongly indicate that the introduction of the Raspberry Pi was well received by the students and contributed positively to their learning outcomes.