An interactive and pen-based simulator to enhance education and research in computer systems: An experience report 

Vincent Tam, Johnny Yeung, C H Leung, Edmund Y Lam and Diane Salter
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

The active use of simulators to facilitate and/or promote learners’ experience in many applications has significantly reshaped the latest educational technology or training methodologies in the past decades. This has included, for example, the training of engineering students to understand the actual working mechanisms of specific engineering principles, business students to practise the formulation of their own investment strategies in a virtual and possibly volatile stock market, and even military officers on tactics planning in a simulated combat environment. In many cases, it was clearly revealed that the appropriate use of simulators not only avoids the indispensable costs of human lives or money lost in the hostile combat or investment field, but also motivates and/or enhances the learners’ interest in the relevant fields of study, thus having a significant impact on their actual performance. However, many conventional simulators often require the users to input a formal specification file such as a script or program to specify the simulation settings. Besides, even in many Windows-based simulators, the users may need to explicitly memorize the meanings of various system variables and also how to reset such variables before restarting a simulation to observe the imparted changes. All these unnecessary hassles drastically reduce the interactivity of the simulators concerned, and therefore lower interest in using them for learning. With the fast-developing tabulate and ultra-mobile PCs, we have seen ample opportunities for employing sophisticated pen-based computing technologies to improve the interactivity of such simulators and so enhance the learners’ experience in using them to learn, reason or visualize in more effective ways. In particular, we have found from our past teaching experience that the use of a Windows-based assembler and simulator may possibly hinder our Year 1 students’ interest in learning to understand the events involved in program execution in a specific computer system. Therefore, in a recent pen-based simulator development project awarded by the Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), we proposed the use of the Microsoft digital ink library to support fast symbol/ character recognition and the XML technologies to define various models of computer architectures flexibly in order to build an innovative and pen-based simulator for mobile computing devices. With pen-based or other inputs, our simulator allows the instructors/students to dynamically add or modify instructions for generating live animations, facilitating interactive discussion in teaching undergraduate to postgraduate courses. In addition, our simulator has the full potential to support research on computer systems through visualization of new results generated from new computational models or optimization strategies. A prototype of the simulator was completed and then released recently to all our Year 1 students for trials in which we collected some initial and positive feedback. A more rigorous evaluation is planned and will be conducted by the end of this spring semester to investigate, for example, the integration into our simulator of relevant course materials in the form of digital resources or pointers to online databases, and to study carefully the pedagogical changes brought about by our innovative and pen-based simulator.