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This special issue is devoted to progress in one of the most important challenges facing computing education.The work published here is of relevance to those who teach computing related topics at all levels, with greatest implications for undergraduate education. Parallel and distributed computing (PDC) has become ubiquitous to the extent that even casual users feel their impact. This necessitates that every programmer understands how parallelism and a distributed environment affect problem solving. Thus,teaching only traditional, sequential programming is no longer adequate. For this reason, it is essential to impart a range of PDC and high performance computing (HPC) knowledge and skills at various levels within the educational fabric woven by Computer Science (CS), Computer Engineering (CE), and related computational science and engineering curricula. This special issue sought high quality contributions in the fields of PDC and HPC education. Submissions were on the topics of EduPar2016, Euro-EduPar2016 and EduHPC2016 workshops,but the submission was open to all. This special issue includes 12 paper spanning pedagogical techniques, tools and experiences.
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Toward High Performance Computing Education
High Performance Computing (HPC) is the ability to process data and perform complex calculations at extremely high speeds. Current HPC platforms can achieve calculations on the order of quadrillions of calculations per second with quintillions on the horizon. The past three decades witnessed a vast increase in the use of HPC across different scientific, engineering and business communities, for example, sequencing the genome, predicting climate changes, designing modern aerodynamics, or establishing customer preferences. Although HPC has been well incorporated into science curricula such as bioinformatics, the same cannot be said for most computing programs. This working group will explore how HPC can make inroads into computer science education, from the undergraduate to postgraduate levels. The group will address research questions designed to investigate topics such as identifying and handling barriers that inhibit the adoption of HPC in educational environments, how to incorporate HPC into various curricula, and how HPC can be leveraged to enhance applied critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Four deliverables include: (1) a catalog of core HPC educational concepts, (2) HPC curricula for contemporary computing needs, such as in artificial intelligence, cyberanalytics, data science and engineering, or internet of things, (3) possible infrastructures for implementing HPC coursework, and (4) HPC-related feedback to the CC2020 project.
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- PAR ID:
- 10170819
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 504 to 505
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Welcome to the 4 th Workshop on Education for High Performance Computing (EduHiPC 2022). The EduHiPC 2022 workshop, held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing Data & Analytics (HiPC 2022), is devoted to the development and assessment of educational and curricular innovations and resources for undergraduate and graduate education in Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) and High Performance Computing (HPC). EduHiPC brings together individuals from academia, industry, and other educational and research institutes to explore new ideas, challenges, and experiences related to PDC pedagogy and curricula. The workshop is designed in coordination with the IEEE TCPP curriculum initiative on parallel and distributed computing ( hitps://tcpp.cs.gsu .edu/curriculum/) for undergraduates majoring in computer science and computer engineering. It is supported by C-DAC, India and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources (CDER). Details for attending the workshop are available on the HiPC webpage (HiPC). The effect of pandemic on academic and research community seems now to be globally receding as was evident from the enthusiastic in-person participation of conference delegates. Please visit the EduHiPC-22 webpage for the complete online proceedings, including copies of papers and presentation slides: EduHiPC 2022 | NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative.more » « less
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Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) has become pervasive and is now exercised on a variety of platforms. Therefore, understanding how parallelism and distributed computing affect problem solving is important for every computing and engineering professional. However, most students in computer science (CS) and computer engineering (CE) programs are still introduced to computational problem solving using an old model, in which all processing is serial and synchronous, with input and output via text using a terminal interface or a local file system. Teaching a range of PDC knowledge and skills at multiple levels in Computer Science (CS) and related Computing and Engineering curricula is essential. The challenges are significant and numerous. Although some progress has been made in terms of curriculum recommendations and educational resources in computer science, trained faculty, motivation, and inertia are still some of the major impediments to introducing PDC early in computing curricula. The authors of this paper conducted a series of week-long faculty training workshops on the integration of PDC topics in CS1 and CS2 classes, and this paper provides an experience report on the impact and effectiveness of these workshops. Our survey results indicate such faculty development workshops can be effective in gradual inclusion of PDC in early computing curricula.more » « less
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Engineering programs have long struggled with balancing curricula that are rigorous enough to prepare graduates to be capable practitioners and educational experiences that are engaging enough to retain undergraduate students. Data show a little more than half of students who start in a program leave after the first or second year, and that many of those students came to dislike engineering or lost interest in the profession. These findings suggest a mismatch between what incoming students think engineering practice is and what message they receive during their first two years of a program. This work will aim to understand how contextualization of what it means to practice engineering can improve the intentions of students, particularly those identifying as underrepresented minorities and women, to persist in a discipline that historically struggles to retain them. With this understanding, changes can be made to undergraduate engineering education to better retain students. In addition, this work will contribute new knowledge about students’ understanding of what it means to practice engineering and how that understanding changes with exposure to different types of contextualization (e.g., historical or technical). It will also contribute new knowledge about how undergraduate students associate engineering science and judgement with engineering practice, particularly with respect to how these facets of engineering practice are directly in service to design. Engineering science courses that occupy the middle two years of a program most often utilize traditional lecture-based pedagogy and simplified close-ended textbook problems, which do not typically allow students to engage in the kind of decision-making that is essential to developing engineering judgement. This work proposes a teaching pedagogy intended to provide students with context for how engineering science concepts are implemented in authentic engineering practice and how engineering judgement is essential in that implementation. Moreover, this work will aim to employ another teaching pedagogy to provide a more holistic contextualization of engineering practice by introducing students to the history of the profession. This pedagogy was implemented during the Fall 2023 semester in a required seminar course for mechanical engineering sophomores at [name of university]. This work will advance the field of engineering education research by studying how students’ perceptions of engineering practice develop as they progress through a program, and how these educational activities can shape that progress and/or reframe their beliefs about their education and training. Semi-structured interviews will reveal how students’ perceptions of engineering practice change longitudinally and whether the aforementioned educational activities influence that trajectory. In addition, a larger group of students will be invited to participate in surveys, which will enable drawing inferences from a broader sample about intention to persist as well as baseline levels of familiarity with engineering in general.more » « less
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Despite recent progress in the adoption of engineering at the K-12 level, the scarcity of high-quality engineering curricula remains a challenge. With support from a previous NSF grant, our research team iteratively developed the three-year middle school engineering curricula, STEM-ID. Through a series of contextualized challenges, the 18-week STEM-ID curricula incorporate foundational mathematics and science skills and practices and advanced manufacturing tools such as computer aided design (CAD) and 3D printing, while introducing engineering concepts like pneumatics, aeronautics, and robotics. Our current project, supported by an NSF DRK-12 grant, seeks to examine the effectiveness of STEM-ID when implemented in diverse schools within a large school district in the southeastern United States. This paper will present early findings of the project’s implementation research conducted over two school years with a total of ten engineering teachers in nine schools. Guided by the Innovation Implementation framework (Century & Cassata, 2014), our implementation research triangulates observation, interview, and survey data to describe overall implementation of STEM-ID as well as implementation of six critical components of the curricula: engaging students in the engineering design process (EDP), math-science integration, collaborative group work, contextualized challenges, utilization of advanced manufacturing technology, and utilization of curriculum materials. Implementation data provide clear evidence that each of the critical components of STEM-ID were evident as the curricula were enacted in participating schools. Our data indicate strong implementation of four critical components (utilization of materials, math-science integration, collaborative group work, and contextualized challenges) across teachers. Engaging students in the EDP and advanced-manufacturing technology were implemented, to varying degrees, by all but two teachers. As expected, implementation of critical components mirrored overall implementation patterns, with teachers who completed more of the curricula tending to implement the critical components more fully than those who did not complete the curricula. In addition to tracking implementation of critical components, the project is also interested in understanding contextual factors that influence enactment of the curricula, including characteristics of the STEM-ID curricula, teachers, and organizations (school and district). Interview and observation data suggest a number of teacher characteristics that may account for variations in implementation including teachers’ organization and time management skills, self-efficacy, and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). Notably, prior teaching experience did not consistently translate into higher completion rates, emphasizing the need for targeted support regardless of teachers' backgrounds. This research contributes valuable insights into the challenges and successes of implementing engineering curricula in diverse educational settings.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3341525.3394989
