2nd yr group practical aiming to teach people how programs work at a low level by visualising a simple stack machine with challenges to teach them the language.
A number of higher-level teaching apps/games have been successful in spreading awareness of algorithmic concepts and basic scripting (e.g. codeacademy.org). However, the gap between high level and low level programming hasn’t been addressed.
We introduce a program to bridge the gap and show that low level programming is conceptually simple, powerful and fun.
The app provides 11 increasingly complex challenges to introduce users to our made-up language. Users are given a limited instruction-set and a task to accomplish; the app runs the user's program and can offer hints or congratulations if they found the optimal solution.
Users start by learning how to perform simple arithmetic by pushing numbers onto a stack and eventually progress to more useful programs (e.g. finding the maximum of an array).
We created a small language and an accompanying stack machine with:
- a single stack
- 4 read/write memory locations
- a readonly input tape and a write-only output tape
These features, along with labels, jumps and conditional statements allow users to create small but interesting programs.