The lecture course consists of about three lectures on each of the following topics:
Covering this many topics in a three credit hour course requires adhering rather rigidly to a schedule. Fortunately, many of the topics are inter-related so that knowledge gained in one topic is immediately used in a following topic. For example, the logical organization of a computer is expanded on when discussing computer arithmetic. The modeling of computer circuits fills in some detail purposely left out of the computer organization topic.
This fast paced presentation of topics leaves little time for discussion of topics in the lecture setting. Some discussion of each topic is done during the weekly meetings of the laboratory course. Recently, an experiment involving required out of class discussion of topics on a local USENET discussion group for the class, has been started. Each student is required to contribute one new discussion thread each week and respond to two or three threads per week. The news group is not moderated, but is archived. Other members of the university community have been invited to read and/or join the discussion of these topics.
A set of lecture notes has been constructed which use J as an expository notation for computer science topics. Each topic has one or more J based descriptive models which is human readable by the students and executable by the laboratory workstation. These models form the basis of laboratory experimentation as well as providing an interactive working model of the topic under discussion so that students may obtain hands-on experience with each topic.
The lecture notes are available to students via a world wide web server and the instructor can use the WWW presentation during lecture presentations. A discussion of how this is accomplished is presented in Section 5.