Hardware Podcasts

496: Beauty, Elegance, Consistency

Embedded.fm · 6 Mar 2025 · 59m · Episode 496

What this episode covers

Professor Shimon Schocken of Reichman University discusses his book 'Elements of Computing Systems' and the 'NAND to Tetris' course, which teaches computer science by building a modern computer from NAND gates up to a working Tetris game. He explains the pedagogical strategy of separating abstraction from implementation, providing students with APIs and test scripts to focus on design principles rather than error handling or efficiency. Schocken also mentions his co-author Noam Nisan, their work on teaching math via games at Matific, and future projects like building symbolic logic and molecular biology concepts from first principles.

Most relevant to

established companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Reichman University, Matific, Memfault, Bose, Lyft, Logitech, Panasonic, Augury, Adafruit, Coursera, Cambridge University Press
Products
Elements of Computing Systems, NAND to Tetris, CS Unplugged
Tools
Verilog, VHDL
Also
Tim Bell, Noam Nisan, Michael Schröder, Yannai Gonczarowski

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