Contribution: This article presents the design of in-game tools to support learning within an educational video game and investigates the impact of tool usage on engineering students' performance in ...an introductory digital circuit design course. Background: Despite the level of appeal of video games to college students, there is a lack of empirical evidence of how to design effective games to address educational goals. One component of games that can serve as a support mechanism to help players be successful in the game is the in-game tools. This article investigates the impact of three types of instructional in-game tools on engineering students' performance on digital circuit design tasks. Research Questions: To what extent do different types of in-game tools (content-specific instructional guidance tool, scaffold, and productivity tool) contribute to players' performance on digital circuit design tasks? Methodology: This article presents the design of an educational video game to teach digital circuits design. It presents three discrete types of in-game tools and investigates their impact on students' learning performance. For this investigation, multiple regression analysis was used to show the relations between the tools and learning performance (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">{N}=176 </tex-math></inline-formula>). Findings: The results show the player use of tools that provide content-specific instructional guidance and scaffolding for troubleshooting is correlated with their learning performance. The productivity tool did not significantly contribute to the learning performance of the students.
Circuit design with no energy dissipation is possible in the reversible logic. Also, using the quantum multiple-valued logic in the design of circuits due to the reduction of circuit width leads to ...the smaller chip area and lower power consumption. Quaternary reversible logic potentially has several advantages in comparison to the equivalent ternary and binary quantum technologies. Hence, the quaternary quantum technology is a promising choice for the future digital system design. Here, the authors proposed an efficient design of 1-qudit and n-qudit quantum comparators. The comparator module is widely used in search conditions, such as Grover's quantum search algorithm in quantum computing. The proposed circuits were better than their existing counterparts in terms of quantum cost, the number of constant inputs, the number of garbage outputs, and hardware complexity. To design these circuits, they have used 1-qudit gates and 2-qudit Muthukrishnan–Stroud gates. The efficiency of their proposed circuits was reported.
Configurable electronic devices have been developed to provide more flexibility in the advanced digital system design, which needs more device density and there by relies on device scaling. Besides, ...International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductor (ITRS) has predicted scaling limitation for conventional silicon (Si)-based devices. Researches on post-Si materials have proved that carbon could be one of the material which can replaced with Si. Owing to exceptional properties of graphene, designs with graphene-based devices can replace with Si based ones. This study proposes design and characterisation of graphene-based simple field-programmable gate array as a platform of configurable logic structure for future developments. This study focuses on design and characterisation of configurable logic block (CLB), flip-flop as internal sequential logic devices in CLB, and routing switch, which are designed using graphene nanoribbon field-effect transistor (GNRFET). The results indicate that proposed CLB is much faster than Si based one and power–delay product of proposed sequential element is much lesser than its counterpart in Si-based technology. In addition, the proposed GNRFET-based routing switch requires minimum count of 6 transistors to provide desirable functionality. Foreseeing the feasibility of architecture, this study suggests the possible layout of the proposed logic elements needed for CLB.
A case study of project-based learning (PBL) implemented in Tianjin University of Technology and Education is presented. This multidiscipline project is innovated to meet the novel requirements of ...industry while keeping its traditional effectiveness in driving students to apply knowledge to practice and problem-solving. The implementation of PBL is described with emphasis in relation to the ability cultivation. The feedback from students shows positive support for the innovations.
Teaching methodology for high school students is in many ways different from teaching at the university level. This paper presents an approach to teaching introductory digital system design to high ...school students of ages 17-18. Students learn the basics of the functionality of digital system components with the goal of understanding the architecture of a simple hypothetical processor. This topic goes beyond the general high school curriculum in Serbia and is targeted at students in classes with a special curriculum for mathematics and computer science subjects. The class covered the following main topics: 1) fundamentals of combinational and sequential circuit design and 2) architecture and design of a simple processor. Practical sessions were performed using a simulator, such that each student designed their own instance of a processor with a simple set of instructions. The classes were evaluated using the exit surveys which showed that students widely accepted the simulator and learning material and were excited to experience and complete the design of a processor. This teaching experience provided additional motivation for the development of more learning materials in computer science and engineering for pre-university education.
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