Developing Dynamic and Interactive Materials to Teach Computing Systems Concepts to All Students

本计画旨在建立电脑系统教育专家社群，为大学生提供互动的学术体验，以服务国家利益。这也将有助于降低高等教育的成本。现代大学教科书的巨额费用限制了那些负担得起的人获得它们的机会。随着计算思维和编程日益成为人们所需要的技能，计算社区需要低成本的课程材料，使所有学生都能获得计算课程。在线课程材料很容易用于编程入门课程。然而，这种高级计算课程的资源并不存在。为了满足这一需求，该项目的领导层开发了“深入系统”，这是一本免费的在线教科书，用于教授高级计算机系统主题。该项目的目标是通过动态可视化、交互式练习和工作示例来增强“潜入系统”，使其成为一本完整的在线教材，其中包括学生的练习和教师的补充资源。该项目的重点是资源开发。它的主要研究问题是关于资源是如何开发的，它们是如何工作的，以及它们作为理解教科书主题的辅助工具的效果如何。这个项目有潜力通过开发一种高质量、免费的在线教科书来帮助计算机领域变得更加公平，这种教科书可以被任何地方的大学生使用。这个项目是斯沃斯莫尔学院和美国军事学院的合作项目，将继续开发免费的计算机系统在线教科书，包括系统软件和计算机架构基础。项目目标包括四个关键领域。一个主要的重点是为计算机系统教科书中的每一章开发交互式练习，允许学生使用一个开源的、由nsf资助的名为Runestone interactive的项目来进行知识检查。其次，该项目将扩展Runestone框架，以允许交互式系统编程，例如汇编代码执行和堆栈跟踪。第三个目标是利用计算机科学教育界的力量来创建丰富的讲师材料。最后，教科书的章节将增加一些简短的视频，将关键概念和例子可视化。该项目每年将开发、实施和评估集中于六个总主题领域子集的练习。来自计算机科学界的专家参与者将在更小的子主题重点小组中工作，其中包括C编程（例如，GDB和Valgrind），汇编编程，二进制表示，内存层次结构和缓存，计算机体系结构，操作系统，并行计算和代码优化等主题。项目评价计划将采用定量和定性相结合的方法。根据先前工作中的早期采用者评估模型，pi将分发学生和教师调查，以收集多个机构的数据。NSF IUSE: EHR计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过参与学生学习轨道，该计划支持有前途的实践和工具的创建，探索和实施。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project aims to serve the national interest by building a community of computer systems education experts to develop and contribute to interactive academic experiences for college students. It will also contribute to helping reduce the cost of higher education. The significant expense of modern college textbooks limits availability to those who can afford them. As computational thinking and programming increasingly become desired skills, the computing community needs low-cost curricular materials to make computing courses available to all students. Online curricular materials are readily available for introductory programming courses. However, such resources for advanced computing courses do not exist. To address this need, this project's leadership developed “Dive into Systems,” a free, online textbook for teaching advanced computer systems topics. The goal of this project is to augment “Dive into Systems” with dynamic visualizations, interactive exercises, and worked examples making it a complete textbook with online resource that will include exercises for students and supplemental resources for instructors. The project’s focus is on resource development. Its main research questions are related to how the resources are developed, how well they are working, and how effective they are as aids to understanding textbook topics. The project has potential to help the field of computing become more equitable by developing a high-quality, free, online textbook that can be used by college students anywhere.This project, a collaborative effort between Swarthmore College and the US Military Academy, will continue development of a freely available online textbook on computing systems, including systems software and computer architecture fundamentals. Project goals include four key areas. A primary focus is to develop interactive exercises for each chapter in a computer systems textbook that allow students to perform knowledge checks using an open-source, NSF-funded project called Runestone Interactive. Secondly, the project will expand the Runestone framework to allow for interactive systems programming, such as assembly code execution and stack tracing. As a third goal, the power of the computer science education community will be leveraged to create a rich assortment of instructor materials. Finally, the textbook chapters will be augmented with short videos visualizing key concepts and examples. The project will develop, implement, and evaluate exercises focusing on a subset of six total topic areas each year. Expert participants from the computer science community will work in smaller sub-topic focused groups which will include topics on C programming (e.g., GDB and Valgrind), assembly programming, binary representation, the memory hierarchy and caching, computer architecture, operating systems, and parallel computing and code optimization. The evaluation plan for the project will employ quantitative and qualitative methods. Following the model of early adopter evaluation in prior work, the PIs will distribute student and faculty surveys to gather data across multiple institutions. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.