Teaching of assembly language as a laboratory science

This paper describes our experience with the implementation of laboratories associated with our undergraduate computer science courses. The beginning assembly language course was chosen as our first experiment with this concept for several reasons. Acquisition of new equipment necessitated reorganization of the course in any case, and the philosophy of learning by experimentation was most easily implemented in a subject "close to the hardware".The concept of a supervised lab in computer science, based on those used in the physical and natural sciences, is relatively new. Teaching assembly language in an assigned, supervised laboratory setting has overwhelming advantages over the more traditional lecture and open lab method. In addition to the obvious guaranteed computer time, the immediate availability of help allows much more material to be covered. Student and faculty acceptance of the labs has been uniformly enthusiastic. So much so, that all of our programming-intensive courses are now scheduled with labs. This paper presents descriptions of the original lab facility itself, later improvements to the facility, the course organization, and examination procedures. It concludes with some general observations and suggestions based on our experience.