9352796 Makedon Parallelism is the future of computing and computer science and should therefore be at the heart of the CS curriculum. Instead of continuing along the evolutionary path by introducing parallel computation "top down" (first in special junior-senior level courses), this radical approach will introduce parallelism at the earliest possible stages of instruction. Specifically, a completely new freshman-level course on data structures that integrates parallel computation naturally, and retains the emphasis on laboratory instruction will be developed. This will help to steer the curriculum as expeditiously as possible toward parallel computing, and provide a national model for other schools to do the same. It will also serve to meet as directly as possible the national need identified in the HPCC initiative to transfer knowledge of high performance computing as quickly as possible into education. This approach is novel in three distinct and essential ways. First, parallel computing will be taught to freshmen in a course designed from beginning to end to do so. Second, the course will be motivating with examples from scientific computation. Third, multimedia and visualization will be used as instructional aids to produce a seamless, exploratory environment. The three primary objectives are: 1) to begin a reform of the undergraduate curriculum with an innovative, laboratory-based, freshman course on parallel computation, 2) to provide a model for national use, and 3) to produce tools and methodologies that improve student understanding of the basic principles of parallel computing that can be disseminated to other schools. ***
