NSF Workshop: Designing Tools and Curricula for Undergraduate Courses in Distributed Systems

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Williams College proposes to organize a workshop that focuses on developing and disseminating new tools and curricula for undergraduate courses in distributed systems and computer networks that leverage the resources available in publicly-accessible testbeds. Given the ubiquity of distributed systems, it is imperative that undergraduate computing education properly address their design and implementation. A key challenge today in teaching distributed systems at the college-level is providing students access to computing and networking resources distributed across the country and world. Educators have an opportunity to fill this gap using a variety of publicly-accessible testbed and cloud platforms now emerging in academia and industry. The 20-30 workshop attendees will come from a variety of institutions, including research universities, liberal arts colleges, and industry. The goal of the workshop is to identify a set of teaching materials that may be used at a broad cross-section of colleges and universities to provide undergraduates with the necessary background and motivation to become involved in systems research. The workshop will result in a report that details the participants' findings, as well as a website that aggregates the relevant educational material.