The ANT-Architecture--An Architecture for CS1

Abstract

A central goal in high-level programming languages, such as those we use to teach introductory computer science courses, is to provide an abstraction that hides the complexity and idiosyncrasies of computer hardware. Although programming languages are very effective at achieving this goal, certain properties of computer hardware cannot be hidden, or are useful to know about. As a consequence, many of the greatest conceptual challenges for beginning programmers arise from a lack of understanding of the basic properties of the hardware upon which computer programs execute. To address this problem, we have developed a simple virtual machine called ANT for use in our introductory computer science (CS1) curriculum. ANT is designed to be simple enough that a CS1 student can quickly understand it, while at the same time providing an accurate model of many important properties of computer hardware. After two years of experience with ANT in our CS1 course, we believe it is a valuable tool for helping young students understand how programs and data are actually represented in a computer system. This paper gives a short introduction to ANT. We start with a brief description of the architecture, and then describe how we use ANT in our CS1 course. We include specific examples that demonstrate how ANT can give students intuition about pointers, the representation of data in memory, and other key concepts.