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Introducing concurrent execution, forking, joining, synchronization, and load balancing of Java threads to trainees allows them to (a) create arbitrary concurrent algorithms, and (b) be exposed to the underpinnings of concurrency concepts. However, it requires the sacrifice of some existing concepts in the course in which such training is added. To keep this sacrifice low, we ambitiously explored if such concepts can be effectively introduced and tested in a single class period, which is approximately an hour, without a live lecture. Students were asked to learn the concurrency concepts by reading, running, fixing, and testing an existing concurrent program, and taking a quiz. They had varying knowledge of concurrency and Java threads but had not implemented concurrent Java programs. Both in-person and remote help were offered. They were allowed to finish their work after class, within a week. The vast majority of them who started on time finished the coding correctly and gave satisfactory quiz answers in ninety minutes. This experience suggests that such hands-on training can be usefully added to courses for training students and instructors that provide no other training in concurrency or training in declarative concepts. Our key ideas can be applied to languages other than Java.
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Broad Awareness of Unseen Work on a Concurrency-Based Assignment
During the Covid pandemic, we gave a Java assignment that exercised threads, synchronization, and coordination and wrote tests to check each concurrency aspect of the assignment. We used four different technologies to record events related to work on this assignment: the Piazza discussion forum, the Zoom conferencing system, an Eclipse plugin, and a testing framework. The recorded data have given the instructors of the course broad awareness of several aspects of student work: How much time did a student spend on an assignment? How many attempts students made on thread, synchronization, and coordination tests before they reached their final scores? How many times did they go to Piazza or use Zoom-supported office-hour visits to fix concurrency problems, and what was the nature of these problems? How effective was Zoom transcription to classify the office hour problems? How long and effective were the office hour visits, and to what extent was screen sharing used during these visits? To what extent did students use the tests to determine if they had met assignment requirements? These data, in turn, have provided us with preliminary answers to a variety of questions we had about unseen work and the concurrency aspects of the assignment. While the answers may be specific to our assignment, the questions answered by these mechanisms can be expected to apply to other settings.
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- PAR ID:
- 10351955
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2021 IEEE 28th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data and Analytics Workshop (HiPCW)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 12 to 20
- 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/10.1109/HiPCW54834.2021.00009
