Integration Of C Into An Introductory Course In Machine Organization

Abstract

We describe the reform of a fourth-semester course in computer organization in the Computer Science BS curriculum at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), an urban minority-serving institution, where Java and integrated development environments (IDEs) have been adopted as the language and development environment used in the first three semesters of major coursework. This project was motivated by faculty observations at UTEP and elsewhere 1 and industry feedback indicating that upper-division students and graduates were achieving reduced mastery of imperative languages with explicit memory management (most notably C), scriptable command line interfaces, and the functions of compilers, assemblers, and linkers.