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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This content will become publicly available on November 12, 2024
Faculty Development Workshops for Integrating PDC in Early Undergraduate Curricula: An Experience Report
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.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1730417
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10492628
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Workshops of The International Conference on High Performance Computing, Network, Storage, and Analysis (SCW 2023)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 314 to 323
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ["computer science education, parallel programming, faculty development"]
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Denver CO USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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