Abstract
Computer architecture is a prevalent topic of study in Informatics and Electrical Engineering courses, though students’ overall grasp of this subject’s concepts is many times hampered, mainly due to the lack of educational tools that can intuitively represent the internal behaviour of a CPU. With the evolution of the ARM architecture and its adoption in higher education institutions, the demand for this sort of tool has increased. Educational tools, specifically developed for the ARMv8 processor, are scarce and inadequate for what is necessary in an academic context. In order to contribute towards solving this problem, eduARM, a practical and interactive web platform that simulates how a ARMv8 CPU functions, was developed and is presented through this paper. Since this tool’s main purpose is to aid computer architecture students, contributing to an improvement in their learning experience, it comprises varied concepts of computer architecture and organization in a simple and intuitive manner, such as the internal structure of a CPU, in both its unicycle and pipelined versions, and the effects of executing a set of instructions. As to better understand its value, the developed tool was then validated through a case study with the participation of computer architecture students. Copyright © 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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One of the most critical ICT application domains is healthcare, where a single failure can lead a patient into a hazardous situation. Due to this, there's a great necessity to ensure that the developed solutions are safe and secure and perform as expected. Smart-Health-4-All (SH4ALL) is a project aiming at accelerating the research, development, commercialization, and dissemination of trustworthy smart health solutions in Portugal. One of the key components of the project is a web platform that supports the generation of integration and system tests for smart health solutions (comprising medical devices, applications, etc.), following a software product line approach. At the domain engineering level, the platform supports the creation of feature models and related test patterns for families of smart health products. At the product engineering level, the platform supports the instantiation of test patterns and the generation of corresponding test scripts ready for execution on specific products under test. This paper presents the aforementioned test platform and test process, and the discovery of test patterns.

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The 2019/2020 school year will always be remembered for the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the first time in recent history, countries closed schools and forced instructors and students to quickly adjust to online classes. This sudden and forced shift to a method of teaching that was completely different from what we were used to presented several challenges and opportunities on a pedagogical level. In this paper we describe our experience as instructors in a course on microprocessor programming in the Master's Degree in Computer Science and Computing Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto. Our approach included changes to the assessment plan, which became more distributed, and improvements in communication between students and instructors through the use of Slack. We found that the changes introduced were not only very well received by students, but also resulted in the best exam attendance and average final grade in the last 10 years of the course's history.