A teaching approach for bridging the gap between low-level and high-level programming using assembly language learning for small microcontrollers

Assembly language programming has been for long used as a teaching tool for computer systems. However, this approach suffers from the difficulties that are inherent to its low-level instructions. The present teaching approachmerges the assembly language course with microcomputers technology by means of structured pseudo-coding. The method is based on a classification of the assembly instructions in a novel inventory, which is subsequently used for the composition of the basic high-level programming possibilities, thus overcoming the limited assembly abilities. The proposed methodology aims at helping the students to make the parallelization between the assembly language programming for 8-bit microcontrollers and a higher level programming. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 19: 525 537, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/ journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.20333