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Computers & Digital Literacy · Grade 8

System Design and Hardware-Software Integration

Learners follow a request from an app down through the operating system, drivers and firmware to the hardware, then look inside the operating system at the jobs it does all the time. They model an embedded system as sensors, a controller and actuators running a sense-decide-act loop, and finish by designing a fictional school greenhouse controller and weighing how often it should take readings against how long its battery lasts.

  • 4 lessons
  • About 95 minutes
  • Systems check: 9 questions
  • Ways to answer: fill in the blanks, choose an answer, trace code, highlight a text, match pairs and type a number
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What learners will discover

  • Describe the layers of a computing system (hardware, firmware, operating system with drivers, applications) and explain how an app reaches hardware through those layers.
  • Explain the main jobs of an operating system (scheduling processes, managing memory, the file system, managing devices, enforcing permissions, providing the user interface) and recognise each job in a situation.
  • Model an embedded system as sensors, a controller and actuators running a sense-decide-act loop, and trace what a simple control rule does with given readings.
  • Design a system block diagram from requirements and reason about tradeoffs such as sampling rate versus battery life.

Lessons

  1. Layers: from an app down to the hardware 7 steps4 practiceabout 22 min
  2. The operating system's hidden jobs 6 steps4 practiceabout 24 min
  3. Embedded systems: sense, decide, act 7 steps5 practiceabout 24 min
  4. Designing a system: diagrams and tradeoffs 7 steps4 practiceabout 25 min
  5. Systems check 9 questions at the end

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