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Encouraging parallel thinking through explicit coordination modeling

Published: 09 March 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Parallel thinking is a mindset that allows people to create support for activities that happen concurrently in a program. It crosscuts extant computer science boundaries, including parallel processing, network programming and multi-user systems, indeed, any system that involves the distribution and reintegration of work. Recent efforts to integrate parallelism across the CS curriculum begin to address the support of parallel thinking. We approach the pedagogy of parallel thinking by teaching students to model coordination explicitly using a specialized coordination language. We report a study of an experimental class taking this approach, finding that advanced CS students lack a good understanding of coordination but that the explicit modeling of coordination can address this lack.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Exploring Students' Understanding of Concurrency - A Phenomenographic StudyProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366856(940-946)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
  • (2015)A Media-Rich Curriculum for Modeling and SimulationProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/2769458.2769471(23-34)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2015
  • (2013)A down-to-earth educational operating system for up-in-the-cloud many-core architecturesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/2414446.241445013:1(1-12)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2013

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGCSE '11: Proceedings of the 42nd ACM technical symposium on Computer science education
March 2011
754 pages
ISBN:9781450305006
DOI:10.1145/1953163
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 09 March 2011

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Author Tags

  1. coordination modeling
  2. distributed computing
  3. parallel computing
  4. parallel thinking
  5. parallelism
  6. pedagogy
  7. tuplespace

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SIGCSE '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 107 of 315 submissions, 34%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,595 of 4,542 submissions, 35%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Exploring Students' Understanding of Concurrency - A Phenomenographic StudyProceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3328778.3366856(940-946)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2020
  • (2015)A Media-Rich Curriculum for Modeling and SimulationProceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation10.1145/2769458.2769471(23-34)Online publication date: 10-Jun-2015
  • (2013)A down-to-earth educational operating system for up-in-the-cloud many-core architecturesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/2414446.241445013:1(1-12)Online publication date: 7-Feb-2013

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