Report on a Project in a Computer Design Course

In this paper we discuss a new approach in teaching the course Computer Design at the Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Iceland. Instead of traditional lectures and recitations these courses have been made more project driven, emphasizing teamwork and reinforcing material that was covered in a previous course. In this paper we describe in particular one project that was carried out in the course on Computer Design and the lessons learned from this new approach of teaching Computer Design. We will focus on one project where a team of students designed and implemented a simple computer (SAP - Simple As Possible). In this project the students used knowledge learned in the course on Computer Design and from a previous course on the fundamentals of Computer Engineering.