Developing Dynamic and Interactive Materials to Teach Computing Systems Concepts to All Students

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore PA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by building a community of computer systems education experts to develop and contribute to interactive academic experiences for college students. It will also contribute to helping reduce the cost of higher education. The significant expense of modern college textbooks limits availability to those who can afford them. As computational thinking and programming increasingly become desired skills, the computing community needs low-cost curricular materials to make computing courses available to all students. Online curricular materials are readily available for introductory programming courses. However, such resources for advanced computing courses do not exist. To address this need, this project's leadership developed “Dive into Systems,” a free, online textbook for teaching advanced computer systems topics. The goal of this project is to augment “Dive into Systems” with dynamic visualizations, interactive exercises, and worked examples making it a complete textbook with online resource that will include exercises for students and supplemental resources for instructors. The project’s focus is on resource development. Its main research questions are related to how the resources are developed, how well they are working, and how effective they are as aids to understanding textbook topics. The project has potential to help the field of computing become more equitable by developing a high-quality, free, online textbook that can be used by college students anywhere. This project, a collaborative effort between Swarthmore College and the US Military Academy, will continue development of a freely available online textbook on computing systems, including systems software and computer architecture fundamentals. Project goals include four key areas. A primary focus is to develop interactive exercises for each chapter in a computer systems textbook that allow students to perform knowledge checks using an open-source, NSF-funded project called Runestone Interactive. Secondly, the project will expand the Runestone framework to allow for interactive systems programming, such as assembly code execution and stack tracing. As a third goal, the power of the computer science education community will be leveraged to create a rich assortment of instructor materials. Finally, the textbook chapters will be augmented with short videos visualizing key concepts and examples. The project will develop, implement, and evaluate exercises focusing on a subset of six total topic areas each year. Expert participants from the computer science community will work in smaller sub-topic focused groups which will include topics on C programming (e.g., GDB and Valgrind), assembly programming, binary representation, the memory hierarchy and caching, computer architecture, operating systems, and parallel computing and code optimization. The evaluation plan for the project will employ quantitative and qualitative methods. Following the model of early adopter evaluation in prior work, the PIs will distribute student and faculty surveys to gather data across multiple institutions. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.