CPATH CB: Community Building Project: Virtualized Gaming as a Pathway to Enhanced Understanding of Complex Networked Systems

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Proposal Number: 0722279 P/I: Joel Wein Institution: Polytechnic University of New York Title: CPATH CB: Community Building Project: Virtualized Gaming as a Pathway to Enhanced Understanding of Complex Networked SystemsThe focus of this project is on building community around educating undergraduates in complex distributed networks and systems. The educational goal is to produce graduates who can design, implement, and manage networked distributed systems. The community building goal is to involve project partners in defining best ways to accomplish the educational goals. Using multi-player, digital game immersion as a vehicle, a community of innovators (including educators from computer and information science, management science, digital media, gaming, and social sciences) will define learning experiences for students in computing. The goal of the community building effort is to create novel approaches to teaching computer science students to build distributed applications for a global economy. A difficult educational hurdle, identified by this team of researchers, is providing students with a real hands-on experience. To address this, the project team will build essential components of a virtual environment and toolset in order to facilitate a gaming environment. In addition the team will leverage a small amount of internal funding to facilitate their effort to: 1. Produce two prototype gaming environments (one troubleshooting scenario and one system building scenario), 2. Conduct preliminary experiments with them at Polytechnic University and Brooklyn College, and, 3. Organize a regional workshop that will bring together a diverse group of educators to discuss applications of gaming in teaching about complex computer systems.This project addresses an important area of national need, the education of future computing practitioners who are able to develop and manage large-scale distributed systems. The outcomes of the project will permit educators to expose their students to realistic platforms so that students may gain experience with complex, distributed and networked systems projects in a globally competitive market.