Driven by recent trends in computing hardware and architectures, the project investigators are working with the larger community of computer science educators to introduce parallel computing concepts into early courses in computer science. A smart repository of available learning materials (e.g., lectures, exercises, assignments, assessments) is being developed that enables computer science educators to easily find and adopt learning materials developed by other educators. Educators are being trained to work with the investigators and the repository system. The project serves the national interest as stated by NSF's mission: to promote the progress of science, by incorporating current and critical concepts in parallel computing at an early stage in a way that is available for all computer science students.
The project takes a scalable and robust approach to building a large collection of materials from a diverse group of instructors and institutions. This pilot study is taking the needed initial steps to reaching this goal: obtaining a sound understanding of the current materials and curricula used in early computer science and parallel computing courses and enable their reuse. To achieve this goal, the project develops a system to classify learning materials against two national standards: the 2013 ACM Computer Science Curriculum Guidelines and the 2012 NSF/IEEE-TCPP Parallel and Distributed Computing curriculum. The system aims to support advanced search features for educational materials, help identify similarity and differences between large sets of materials, and reveal potential gaps in existing materials. The system is accessible through a web interface to maximize adoption by CS educators looking to introduce parallel computing concepts, especially those in early CS courses. The project engages early users of the system coming from the Computer Science Education community and the Parallel Computing community through a series of workshops held at various computer science education community events and parallel computing community events.
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.
