16 Cards to Get Into Computer Organization

Abstract

This paper presents a novel educative activity for teaching computer architecture fundamentals. This activity is actually a game that uses 16 cards and involves about twenty active participant students. Executing this activity in the fi rst class of the course allows the studentin only 45 minutes to acquire the fundamental concepts of computer organization. The results of the surveys that evaluate the proposed activity together with the grades obtained by the students at the end of course corroborate the importance of the proposed game in the assimilation of more complex concepts in computer architecture.