Logisim: a graphical system for logic circuit design and simulation
Journal on Educational Resources in Computing (JERIC)
Teaching secure communication protocols using a game representation
ACE '03 Proceedings of the fifth Australasian conference on Computing education - Volume 20
Serious toys: teaching the binary number system
Proceedings of the 17th ACM annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
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This paper describes using an open source, freely available logic simulation package to build visualizations to teach IT concepts. The first visualization is of an XOR based, symmetric encryption/decryption process. While it is not the actual process used in modern encryption, it illustrates concepts that are used in encryption/decryption and are often used in IT, particularly in computer and Internet technology to protect files and secure transactions. While actual encryption would be over a much larger word size and use several passes in the encryption process, this tool clearly illustrates the basics of the process. A second visualization shows Hexadecimal numbers with their binary and decimal counterparts. These are important concepts in understanding how bit patterns can represent many different things within a computer. The flexibility of these visualizations is shown by a small circuit addition that can add ASCII characters to this display. Building these visualizations could be done with many different software tools; however, using a logic simulator for some visualizations has the advantages of being easy and also providing insight into the logic of the process that are being visualized.