The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a medium-scale CISE infrastructure project building a national virtual laboratory for network experimentation. However, in addition to the use of GENI as an experimental platform, NSF and the GENI community have long recognized the potential to use it as a platform for innovation in teaching undergraduate networking and distributed systems courses. A workshop on the issues of undergraduate teaching using GENI and other cloud systems was held in conjunction with the fourteenth GENI Engineering Conference (GEC) in Boston, MA on July 8, 2012. One of the findings of the workshop was that "the first step to redefining undergraduate systems education is to inform educators at a broad cross section of colleges and universities about the resources available to them and their students."
Every year, ACM SIGCSE (Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) brings together educators and researchers from around the world to present papers, panels, posters, special sessions, and workshops, and to discuss computer science education in birds-of-a-feather sessions and informal settings. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium addresses problems common among educators working to develop, implement and/or evaluate computing programs, curricula, and courses. This project funds a workshop on use of GENI in the classroom at the 2013 ACM SIGCSE meeting in Denver, Colorado. Since computer systems are the core infrastructure of modern society, the workshop supports maintaining and building a workforce that is able to address critical national needs and exploit new commercial opportunities. The tutorial will occur on Wednesday, March 6, 2013, at the conference venue.
