Design And Development Of Virtual Experiment Platform For Computer Hardware Teaching

At present, classroom teaching and experiment teaching of hardware curriculumare given separately in many colleges and universities. Classroom teaching trends tosimplex theoretical education. In addition, limited experimental fund results in shortof experimental facilities, slow refresh rate, the aging of equipment and other severeproblems. It is very difficult for students to grasp theoretical knowledge thoughenough experiments. Thus, virtual experimental platform has become one of thesignificant schemes for addressing above problems. Teachers can make teachingdemonstration via virtual experimental platform, in which students can conductexperiments without any limitation of time and site. Therefore，virtual experimentalplatform can remit many problems existing in traditional hardware classroomteaching. The novel teaching mode would become an essential instrument in theclassroom and experiment teaching of hardware curriculum.According to the overall thinking of analysis, modeling and implementing, wefirstly introduce the concept and research significance of virtual experimentalplatform. And then we analyze the research achievements of domestic and overseas inthis field. Additionally, we summarize the pros and cons of current virtual hardwareexperimental platform, and discuss the purpose and meaning of establishing virtualcomputer hardware experimental platform.Secondly, on the basis of the deeply research of computer hardware courseexperiment, this thesis proposes a platform framework, which is composed by DOSvirtual machine, virtual drive program and operating circuit demonstration system.Additionally, due to the function in each module of the framework, we list and discussthe possible function technologies. Finally， we confirm implementing specifictechnologies of each module by the comparison.Eventually, the thesis designs multi-element demonstration of virtualcomponents.and a virtual device driver. The virtual device driver intercepts thefunction of IN/OUT command in procedure executing in virtual DOS machine. Itutilizes shared memory technology and event synchronization to complete two-waycommunication between virtual device driver and experiment circuit demonstrationsystem, which achieves two-way communication between experiment circuitdemonstration system and virtual DOS machine.The design objective of the platform is to satisfy classroom teaching and experiment requirements of hardware curriculum at present stage. And it has goodexpansibility for, adding relevant new elements by development trend of hardwaretechnology in the future.The research work is financed by the National Natural Science Foundation(61103248) and the Hubei Province Teaching Research Project (鄂教高函[2011] No.32).