Resource-constrained devices are becoming ubiquitous. Examples include cell phones, palm pilots, and digital thermostats. It can be difficult to fit required functionality into such a device without sacrificing the simplicity and clarity of the software. Increasingly complex embedded systems require extensive brute-force testing, making development and maintenance costly. This is particularly true for system components that are written in assembly language. Static checking has the potential of alleviating these problems, but until now there has been little tool support for programming at the assembly level.In this paper we present the design and implementation of a static checker for interrupt-driven Z86-based software with hard real-time requiremeng. For six commercial microcontrollers, our checker has produced upper bounds on interrupt latencies and stack sizes, as well as verified fundamental safety and liveness properties. Our approachis based on a known algorithm for model checking of pushdown systems, and produces a control-flow graph annotated with information about time, space, safety, and liveness. Each benchmark is approximately loo0 lines of code, and the checking is done in a'few seconds on a standard PC. Our tool is one of the first to give an efficient and useful static analysis of assembly code. It enables increased confidence in correctness, significantly reduced testing requirements, and support for maintenance throughout the system life-cycle.

PANEL SUMMARYThe number of undergraduates entering computer science has declined in recent years. This is paralleled by a drop in the number of high school students taking the CS AP exam and the number of high schools offering computer science courses. The declines come at a time when career opportunities in CS continue to grow and computer science graduates are seen as crucial in building a globally competitive workforce for the 21 st century. Efforts aimed at reversing the declining interest in computer science include curriculum revisions at the undergraduate level at many institutions, a re-design of computer science AP courses [1], and the inclusion of computational thinking into disciplines outside computer science [3].This panel discusses four projects of computer science researchers collaborating with high school teachers on integrating computing and computational thinking into their courses. The majority of the high school teachers involved is teaching science and math courses. They are teaching a diverse group of talented and college-bound students. The goal of all projects is to integrate computing into disciplines represented in the high school curriculum and to raise the awareness of computer science as an exciting and intellectually rewarding field. This panel will outline recent and on-going activities and interaction with high school teachers. Each panelist will describe how he/she got involved and the nature of the interaction. The panelists will talk about their individual projects, outline their visions for future interactions, and how their effort can be replicated by others. The session will briefly describe NSF's RET program which provided teacher support for three of the four projects. The session will then be opened for discussion; the audience will be encouraged to ask questions and contribute additional ideas for the inclusion of computational thinking in high school courses.The "Science Education in Computational Thinking (SECANT)'' project at Purdue University collaborated with two high school physics teachers to incorporate selected material of the Matter&Interaction (M&I) Curriculum with computational thinking principles into high school physics courses [3]. The high school course includes three weeks of Python programming focusing on computational methods and visualizations crucial to the M&I Curriculum. Lab material developed within this project gives a first introduction to programming. Throughout the school year, students use computation to illustrate and simulate physical principles and models, and they apply computational thinking concepts. The computational concepts include designing repeated processes through iterations, determining how data generated is stored and represented, abstracting and generalizing physical processes, and visualizing the collected data to observe patterns and other phenomena.This approach is currently implemented in the AP Physics course. The high school devotes a full year to AP Physics and has some flexibility on what material to cover. Introducing ...

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This paper describes Marquette University's efforts to build an experimental embedded systems laboratory for hands-on projects in an introductory hardware systems course. Our prototype laboratory is now serving as the basis for a coherent sequence of class projects threaded throughout subsequent courses in operating systems, networking, and embedded systems, among others. We describe the major components of our laboratory environment, how it is used in our hardware systems course, and how this has contributed to significant improvements in other core courses in our curriculum.

This paper describes Marquette University's efforts to build an experimental embedded systems laboratory for hands-on projects in an operating systems course. Our prototype laboratory is now serving as the basis for a coherent sequence of class projects threaded throughout courses in hardware systems, operating systems, networking, and embedded systems. We describe the major components of our Embedded XINU laboratory environment, the operating systems course, and related improvements in other core courses of our curriculum.