Parallel and distributed computing (PDC) has become pervasive in all aspects of computing, and thus it is essential that students include parallelism and distribution in the computational thinking that they apply to problem solving, from the very beginning. Computer science education is still teaching to a 20th century model of algorithmic problem solving. Sequence, branch, and loop are taught in our early courses as the only organizing principles needed for algorithms, and we invest considerable time in showing how best to sequentially process large volumes of data. All computing devices that students use currently have multiple cores as well as a GPU in many cases. Most of their favorite applications use multiple cores and numbers of distributed processors. Often concurrency offers simpler solutions than sequential approaches. Industry is desperate for software engineers who think naturally in terms of exploiting these capabilities, rather than seeing them as an exotic upper-level topic that gets layered over a sequential solution. However, we are still teaching students to solve problems using sequential thinking. In this workshop we overview key PDC concepts and provide examples of how they may naturally be incorporated in early computing classes. We will introduce plugged and unplugged curriculum modules that have been successfully integrated in existing computing classes at multiple institutions. We will highlight the upcoming summer training workshop, for which we have funding to support attendance, as well as other CDER (Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources) activities.
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Unplugged Activities to Introduce Parallel Computing in Introductory Programming Classes: an Experience Report
Learning programming in early introductory classes is challenging for first year university students, and introducing parallel programming (PDC) in early classes along with traditional sequential programming is even more challenging. Unplugged activities may help alleviate some of the difficulties for students. Unplugged activities have been shown to increase student interest, and to enhance student understanding of CS programming concepts. We have used unplugged activities to teach PDC concepts before introducing parallel programming. Our experiences show that using unplugged activities to introduce the PDC concepts reduce the barrier to learn parallel programming.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1730417
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10191329
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ITiCSE '19: Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 309 to 309
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3304221.3325573
