Classroom Glossary Public page

CON-101 Instructor Guide

How to teach CON-101. Anchored on the CSA-101 instructor-guide pattern; adapted to the analyze-not-copy discipline that defines the CON track.

What CON-101 is and is not

CON-101 is not a from-scratch HDL course. CSA-101 already did that. CON-101 teaches students to read someone else's HDL, name the choices the author made, and modify the code intentionally. The pedagogical move is the inverse of CSA-101's. Your job as the instructor is to keep the analyze-not-copy discipline visible in every module.

Pacing

Ten weeks at two sessions per week of ninety minutes each, plus four hours of structured lab and six hours of independent practice per week. Modules 4 (mappers), 7 (homebrew ROM), and 10 (capstone) routinely run over for slower students; budget extra office-hours capacity for those weeks.

Per-module emphasis

  • Module 1. Get the MiSTer framework booted. If a student cannot boot a stock NES core on a real DE10-Nano (or on the browser jsnes if they are going the no-hardware route) by end of Week 1, they will fall behind every subsequent week. Make this the lecture-and-lab session, not just lecture.
  • Module 2. The 6502 review. Most students will have seen 6502 in CSA-101 already; for those who skipped it, point them at the 6502 REPL on the workbench and the Petzold chapters CSA-101 referenced.
  • Module 3. The first community-core read. Walk the open-source NES core's PPU module with the class on the projector. This sets the tone for what analyze-not-copy looks like in practice.
  • Module 4. The first non-trivial modification. The MMC1 lab is where students hit the discipline wall. Some try to copy upstream mappers verbatim. Push them back.
  • Module 5. A second architecture for compare-and-contrast. The Game Boy LR35902-versus-Z80 nuance is the conceptual hook; surface it early.
  • Module 6. A third architecture. SNES is the most complex; do not let students rabbit-hole on bsnes-plus internals.
  • Module 7. The most fun and the most where students disappear into their own ROM. Hold a midpoint check-in.
  • Module 8. The video and audio plumbing. Often skipped in retro-emulation tutorials but the meat of where MiSTer earns its reputation.
  • Module 9. The forward-pointer to RE-101. The cousin-mapping diagram is the artefact RE-101 will reference; the SB6141 lab target is downstream.
  • Module 10. Capstone delivery. Live demos in front of the cohort. Hold a tech-rehearsal session the week before.

Common student failure modes

  1. Copying instead of analyzing. The biggest one. Push back hard in Modules 3, 4, 7. The discipline is the whole point of the course.
  2. Quartus install black hole. Plan a Week 1 office-hours block for stuck installs. Have the academy SETUP-video URL ready.
  3. Rabbit-holing on perfect modification before any modification. Module 4 sets the cadence. A working MMC1 variant beats a perfect one not finished.
  4. Homebrew ROM scope creep. The Module 7 lab is fifty to one hundred lines of 6502. Students who decide they want to write Mega Man 6 will not finish. Hold them to scope.
  5. Cores compiled but no demo recorded. Schedule the demo-recording session in Week 9, not Week 10.

Assessment calibration

The 40-30-30 rubric in CAPSTONE.html is non-negotiable. The single most common over-grading failure mode is rewarding effort on modification depth (40%) when the engineering discipline and reproducibility (30%) collapse. If the grader cannot reproduce the build from the README, the score on the discipline axis drops two letter grades regardless of how clever the modification.

Equipment management

If you are running CON-101 with a cohort larger than five students, the DE10-Nano kits are the bottleneck. The academy ships the curriculum with a cohort-sharing pattern: two students per kit, alternating Modules 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 versus 2 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 10. Plan the schedule against the kit-share assumption from Week 0.

Cross-track coordination

  • Pairs naturally with CSA-201 (Computer Systems Architecture II) on the production-grade hardware track. Students doing both in the same semester see fewer Quartus-install delays.
  • Forward-pointer to RE-101: the Module 9 cousin-mapping diagram. Make sure students leave it in a state RE-101 can reference.
  • Forward-pointer to RF-201 + RF-301: the FPGA discipline transfers directly. Students who finish CON-101 can take RF-201 with one less prereq.