UChicago χ-Projects: programming assignments for undergraduate CS courses

This is really cool, I'm a TA at the program at my school and I really wish I had the opportunity to teach the kids at my program this sort of material. This would be the stuff I would love doing.

One thing that I think would be really cool, that I've never seen done, is teach people how to write a simple C subset, then a VM, then a bootloader, then a small kernel & fs, then a small unix-like OS.

Take someone from start to finish. Eventually end up with a OS that has multitasking, file systems, TCP/IP, and a compiler.

I'd love to connect the program with some CE majors and have them, from day one, design and build every chip in a computer DMA, memory, CPU, and BIOS. Every step of the way having all of the chips fabricated.

Then at the end, pair everyone up in random groups and have the CS majors get their code working on the buggy, poorly engineered hardware. Preapre them for the real world.