Mine too at UIUC almost 20 years ago! We had to design a working CPU for the instruction set in verilog or VHDL, then run a program in the simulator.

I still vaguely remember that exactly one instruction needed 2 passes through the core pipeline. During decode, we would inject the reserved word into the instruction pipeline to represent the 2nd pass. We were pretty proud of that "innovation".

I thought it seemed familiar! EE 306: Introduction to Computing with prof Yale Patt. Almost 15 years ago now.

I remember on the first day of class, prof Patt described his philosophy of learning EE: start from the ground up. Many students went in to that class barely able to use Word and came out knowing how a simple computer worked.

Happy to see LC-3 is still being used.