So we now start this journey by telling our students that God gave us NAND — (Laughter) — and told us to build a computer, and when we asked how, God said, "" One step at a time. "" And then, following this advice, we start with this lowly, humble NAND gate, and we walk our students through an elaborate sequence of projects in which they gradually build a chip set, a hardware platform, an assembler, a virtual machine, a basic operating system and a compiler for a simple, Java-like language that we call "" JACK. "" The students celebrate the end of this tour de force