When I was in second or third year of computer science in 1971 or '72, we (of course) learned IBM 360 assembler, but we also had to design a simple binary adder using AND OR and XOR gates. All on paper - no need for any soldering or electronics, which I regret. I cannot remember how many bits of input - probably 4 but may have been 6. But I did do quite a bit of asm programming, including a routine for calculating square roots using Chebyschev polynomials and newtons algorithm.