Edu.LMC: a new LMC simulation approach using LMC Paradigm

Little Man Computer (LMC) Paradigm, a simple representation of a real computer system with pedagogical purposes, was firstly presented in 1965. It follows von Neumann’s Architectural Model and uses a simplified instruction set. Since then, many simulators have been developed based on this Paradigm. Mainly, those simulators have been designed to be used by undergraduate students in Computer Architecture courses. We developed a new LMC simulator – edu.LMC –created especially for students with very basic skills on Computer Architecture, mostly not majors on Computer Science or Computer Engineering. This is a special purpose simulator with a clear pedagogical focus, tested and used during Computer Architecture classes for a Management and Informatics course. edu.LMC includes many features that are difficult to find together in other LMC simulators. Some existing simulators are more complete, but also too complex to be used in this learning context. In this paper, we present edu.LMC's main characteristics, some utilization examples and preliminary evaluation results.