The Active classroom: Students and Instructors Parallel Programming in Parallel

The biggest difficulty that students face when learning programming is in developing the necessary cognitive skills that allows them to apply what they have learnt. It is generally accepted that programming is one of those things that can only be learnt by doing and actively engaging with it. Parallel programming is a prime example of a programming area that students commonly struggle with. A major inhibitor is due to some of its abstract concepts, making it difficult to grasp a true understanding of the underlying principles in a traditional classroom setting. This paper discusses the underlying principles that motivated the development of Active Classroom Programmer (ACP), a tool for students to learn effective programming strategies with the guidance of their instructor. ACP aims to increase students skills in applying programming topics, by immediately engaging them with the newly introduced material. This is especially important in parallel programming, as the topics quickly progress onto the many parallelisation caveats (such as thread-safety, race conditions, and so on). While laboratory or homework exercises provide students with valuable hands-on experience (to apply newly taught concepts), this opportunity generally arrives too late after the material is presented in the lesson. To address this, a collection of parallel programming exercises are being developed for the NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing (as an Early Adopter award), with the help of ACP. Instructors are welcome to utilise any of the developed exercises, or even request a private ACP account for their own courses to program with their students.