Abstract:
Students often have difficulty in comprehending introductory courses or subjects in
computer organization and assembly language. A student needs to master a wide range of
skills and details in order to understand these courses. These courses oftentimes are difficult
to explain on paper and needs a hands-on teaching method. Students were often intimidated
by the numerous binary notations that they do not need to understand [1]. There are no
adequate tools to visualize the dynamic interaction of software with hardware during
program execution at the machine level. With that in mind we need to develop a tool that
simulates a working model of a general computer.
CompSim is a web-based system with the following features: a learning module on
fetch and execute cycle of a computer, a simulator that shows the operations of the fetch
and execute cycle of a computer program, a text editor that would enable users to run
assembly programs, a mini-assembly language to be used as the basic language for
writing program codes in the system, and finally a parser that would parse the programs
written in the text editor to verify the correctness of syntax/rules.
