A Graphical User Interface of a Visual Simulator for Computer Literacy and Architecture Education

A visual computer simulator has been designed and developed to help learners to understand computer literacy and architecture. It is used in real lectures and exercises of computer architecture. Our simulator is written in Java and works as an applet as well as a stand-alone application. Its graphical user interface (GUI) provides visual simulating function in the register-transfer level and assists beginners of computer science to comprehend how computer works. This paper describes details of its GUI and reports a statistical evaluation from its users (learners). And, it is confirmed that an educational effect of its GUI is statistically significant. Introduction As computers advance by rapid strides, recently, education with computers, so-called an IT-based education, becomes much more popular in many kinds of educational fields, especially engineering education. In order to gain wild range of academic activities, it is necessary for learners to understand computer more and more. The more a computer itself evolves, the more its internal structure and behavior becomes like a black-boxed. So it is very import for learners to understand the internal structure and behavior of a computer precisely, if they want to utilize a computer in the various application fields. It becomes much more necessary for learners to understand Computer Literacy and Architecture in the efficient way (Yehezkel, 2001), (Anido-Rifón, 2001), (Null, 2003). Of course, it takes relatively long time for beginners to study how a computer works. Some types of simulators have been designed and developed to educate Computer Literacy, Information Science and Computer Architecture as useful educational tools. By the way, it is one of the most efficient and effective approaches for learners to use Web-based educational tool (Chen, 2005). Many researches and projects have provided such useful tools during a few years. Web-based e-Learning system seems to be one of the most fruitful results of IT-based education. However, there is an important problem how to design and develop Web-based educational tool suitably. There may be no royal way to design or develop a general-purpose Web-based educational tool or e-Learning system. In order to design and develop a specific educational tool, therefore, it is useful to 1) survey the related works and obtain the suitable hits or ideas from them, 2) bring objectives (design concepts) into focus, 3) implement a prototype in a reasonable way, 4) apply it to real education field and 5) evaluate it based on viewpoint of effectiveness. We have done in the above way as this paper describes in the following sections. Our paper focuses how to design and develop a graphical user interface (GUI) of our educational tool. So the paper presents some kinds of related works, overview of a GUI of our tool, its typical functions, application of it into real education, a brief evaluation of it by means of chi-square test for an examination result of its users (learners) and finally concluding remarks, sequentially. Related Works Visualization is an absolutely necessary keyword and idea to improve the learner's understanding level. For example, when instructors educate their learners about computer, they want to use effective educational tools. These tools are expected to have some kind of function to visualize what is difficult to understand. With such tools, many learners will understand computer in a shorter period than other cases without using visualization tool (Yehezkel, 2001), (Anido-Rifón, 2001), (Null, 2003). The first half of this section focuses the following three researches as the related works based on simulators with visualization.