A Survey of Assignments in Undergraduate Computer Architecture Courses

Computer architecture is an essential topic in undergraduate Computer Science (CS) curricula. Teaching computer architecture courses to CS students can be challenging, as the concepts are on a high abstraction level and not easy to grasp for students. Learning of computer architecture abstracts is strongly reinforced by hands-on assignment experience. This paper presents results from a survey of assignments from 40 undergraduate computer architecture courses, which are offered in 40 CS departments. These surveyed courses are selected from universities listed among the 120 top North America universities by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities 2015. The information used for this survey is based solely on material publicly accessible on the websites of courses.