I'll present an educational approach that synthesizes many abstractions, algorithms, and data structures learned in key CS courses, and makes them concrete by building a complete computer system – hardware and software – from the ground up. The methodology is based on guiding students through a set of 12 hands-on projects that gradually construct and unit-test a simple hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy, yielding a surprisingly powerful computer system. The hardware projects are done in a simple hardware description language and a supplied hardware simulator. The software projects (assembler, VM, and a compiler for a simple object-based, Java-like language) can be done in any language, using supplied API's and test programs. We also build a basic OS. The result is a general-purpose computer system, simulated on the student's PC, and capable of running interactive computer games, and any other program. This work has led to a book, several papers, two MOOCs, and courses taught in many universities. All our materials and software tools are freely available in open source in www.nand2tetris.org (joint work with Noam Nisan, Hebrew University)
Shimon Schocken is the founding dean of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at Reichman University. He also taught at NYU, and was a visiting professor at Harvard and Stanford. He specializes in developing tools and frameworks for CS and Math education.