Teaching practice reforms towards software-hardware collaboration in computer system ability training-Taking FPGA Design course as an example

Computer system ability training is a new trend in computer education. This paper proposed an innovative experimental teaching method of software and hardware collaborative design to better develop students' system view, structure view, engineering view of computers. An FPGA-based CNN accelerator was designed to combining the knowledge from software to compilation and then to hardware. The main innovations are: (1) Innovation of experimental system: A “curriculum tree” based on knowledge map was built to identify the implicit relationship between software and hardware knowledge. The curriculum was changed from Horizontal Teaching to Vertical Teaching in order to reduce the difficulties of cultivating system ability; (2) Innovation of experiment contents: it proposed an experiment teaching strategy of “Managing Complexity With Simplicity” guided by Occam's razor and used some effective methods to simply the system knowledge of each course around the top-level goals; (3) Innovation of experiment methods: a procedural and flow-based experiment model based on hierarchical experimental contents was used to achieve spiral progressive learning from software design to hardware simulation and then to system development; @Innovation of experiment platforms: an innovative method of conducting experiments, MODE (MODE = Experiment + MOOC) was proposed to allow students to do experiments “anytime, anywhere and on demand”.