Teaching Multithreaded Programming to Computer Science Undergraduates

随着多线程计算作为科学和工程的强大工具的不断出现，科学家和工程师非常需要介绍多线程编程。所有流行的操作系统都已经支持多线程编程，流行的POSIX Pthreads标准也刚刚获得批准。现在正是教授学生这项新技术的好时机。这样，学生们将能够把这些技能运用到他们的工作中，提高这个国家的竞争力。该项目的主要目标是设计一套全面而灵活的课程材料，用于向大二和大三的学生教授多线程编程，以便它可以跨几门课程使用，也可以在一个专门的课程中使用。第二个目标是开发教学编程辅助工具，让学生可视化和实验多线程编程中的各种概念。这些概念包括程序行为和执行可视化，死锁和竞争状态检测，以及用于测量学生程序复杂性的软件度量。通过在一个地方整合许多潜在的用途，这个建议的项目将提高学生对多线程编程的理解，以便它可以在几个课程和应用程序中使用。对该技术的基本了解将有助于非cs学生提高他们的能力水平，并使他们能够在各自的领域自信地使用多线程编程。这个项目的影响还可能包括提高学生的保留率和增加多线程应用程序和系统软件开发毕业生的就业能力。

With the continuing emergence of multithreaded computation as a powerful vehicle for science and engineering, the need for an introduction to multithreaded programming for scientists and engineers is high. All popular operating systems already support multithreaded programming and the popular POSIX Pthreads standard has just been approved. It is the right time to teach students this new technology. In so doing, students will be able to carry the skills over to their jobs and increase this nation's competitiveness. The primary goal of the project is to design a set of comprehensive and flexible course materials for teaching multithreaded programming to sophomore and junior students so that it can be used across several courses or in a dedicated one. A secondary goal is to develop pedagogical programming aids for the students to visualize and experiment with various concepts in multithreaded programming. These concepts include program behavior and execution visualization, deadlock and race condition detection, and software metrics for measuring the complexity of students' programs. By consolidating many potential uses in a single place, this proposed project will improve students' understanding of multithreaded programming so that it can be used in several courses and applications. A basic understanding of the technology will help non-CS students to enhance their level of competence and allow them to use multithreaded programming with confidence in their respective fields. The impact of this project may also include an improved retention rate of students and an increased employability of graduates in multithreaded application and system software development.