Yah! I was familiar with old "microprocessor trainers" and I tried to recreate that. There's nice on-chip debug that makes writing a monitor to do this pretty easy.
I was more thinking-- curriculum? How old were you? Anything particular stick with you that I should be sure to include?
I was 17 to 19 at the time. We had everything, from math, physics, electronics, chip design (board layout simulation etc), micro processors (and after a year assembler on a DOS PC), networking, operating systems (mainframe + Unix + NT), C, Pascal, VBA. Add generic programming, English, project management and some other courses you need for soft skills. 18 months, 40 hours a week, two tests a week all with a full stipend for everyone. After that, you are hardened.
So the curriculum mentioned was more contextual than specific to microcontrollers. They created generalists which are capable of deep diving where they are then used within the company. For microprocessor in detail, I think they focused on translating algorithmic problems and higher level constructs into op codes (something like tail calls).
Wow-- that's really awesome-- a very deep generalist curriculum.
This is along the lines of what I'd like to ultimately create. It's hard, though, because I am offering this in the form of electives, and students have limited slots to fill and as they get older their willingness to take any risk in selecting a class decreases. I teach in both high school and middle school, and I've found I can be a lot "bolder" in what I teach in the middle school so far.
IMHO middle and high school do not have the life focus and specialization yet. Hacking on a microprocessor trainer is no fun and definitely does not bring you anything if you are not in CS and even then you can survive without.
I did give them system calls to draw sprites and things on the LCD.
My students had fun competing over all the challenges. Scored very well in the anonymous post-class surveys, too, though I did have one critical score. Also the majority of the students from that class are electing at least one of my classes next year.
Each year I teach one "crazy" class with undergraduate level material to MS students. This year it's going to be circuits. They're going to learn KCL/KVL, transistor biasing, oscillators, amplifiers and gates, how to use decoders and logic gates to spell things on 7seg displays, etc.
> definitely does not bring you anything if you are not in CS
I think knowing what a computer actually is is valuable information to know.
> IMHO middle and high school do not have the life focus and specialization yet.
That's one of the nice things about having an elective-heavy school. They do a deep class on computer architecture, then they go participate in a musical, then they take a 3d art class. Immerse yourself deeply in lots of things to see what's interesting and to get exposure to many ideas.
Think that with old style boards, old-style chips, old-style number screen.