The idea for class was to give the students a better understanding of the way in which a computer program with several functions and various kinds of arguments is actually executed by the computer. Students were assigned parts, i.e. a student became a particular function whose statements they had to perform (execute), when their function was called, using only the data which was passed to the function at that time. One person also assumed the part of the operating system, whose job it was to pass arguments to the various functions, and perform any input or output tasks.

Each student in the class had a copy of the program, to be able to follow along, and after I explained the ground rules, I let them "execute" the program by describing what they were doing and why. All students were able to ask questions at any time, and the program was executed very slowly, because many explanations were required.

It seemed to me that most students participated in the discussion, and many issues that were confusing were brought out into the open and discussed. As a result, many students were able to clear up a number of fundamental misconceptions they had about how a program executed and the nature of argument passing.