Aline Normoyle Brings Recreation Design into the Classroom

“No self-deprecating comments about our programs – our achievement is recreating, from scratch, machines as powerful as the 1980s Atari.”

With that directive, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Aline Normoyle handed over the reins to her college students as they shared their last tasks. In CMSC 240 Principles of Computer Organization, college students examine the hierarchical design of recent digital computer systems, began on the {hardware} stage and culminating within the development of a online game. 

“This sort of low-level programming is super valuable”, Normoyle says. “Understanding how software interacts with the underlying hardware is the basis of all computing systems.”

And generally it could actually save lives.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, “white-hat hacking”, or moral safety hacking, was an integral a part of addressing points arising from ventilator shortages. Many ventilators are designed to allow them to solely be repaired by licensed restore technicians. However, such technicians had been in brief provide and in some circumstances, the place corporations had gone out of enterprise, unavailable altogether. Engineers with device-level software program data had been capable of restore such ventilators. 

For Normoyle, tales reminiscent of these underscore the significance of this course. Low-level programming is way more troublesome than programming with fashionable high-level software program languages – and the abilities and data round such programming are more and more uncommon. However, the folks will these abilities are those who’re constructing the infrastructure for main technological advances reminiscent of autonomous autos and synthetic intelligence. 

Recent grad Emma Lee ’25, who took a number of lessons with Normoyle throughout her time as a pc science main, says she discovered this course important in serving to her perceive how computer systems truly work. For her last venture, she created a recreation that exams one’s capacity to lie.