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

开发动态和交互式材料来向所有学生教授计算系统概念

• 批准号: 2141722
• 负责人: Kevin Webb
• 金额: $ 48.55万
• 依托单位: Swarthmore College
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-04-01 至 2025-03-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2141722&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Dynamic; Interactive; Materials; Teach

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.

该项目旨在通过建立一个计算机系统教育专家社区，为大学生开发和促进互动学术经验，为国家利益服务。它还将有助于降低高等教育的成本。现代大学教科书的巨大费用限制了那些负担得起的人的可用性。随着计算思维和编程越来越成为所需的技能，计算社区需要低成本的课程材料，使计算课程提供给所有学生。在线课程材料可随时用于入门编程课程。然而，高级计算机课程的这种资源并不存在。为了满足这一需求，该项目的领导开发了“潜入系统”，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。这个项目的目标是增加“潜入系统”与动态可视化，互动练习，并工作的例子，使其成为一个完整的教科书与在线资源，将包括练习的学生和教师的补充资源。 该项目的重点是资源开发。它的主要研究问题是如何开发的资源，以及他们的工作，以及如何有效地帮助理解教科书的主题。该项目有可能通过开发一个高质量的、免费的、可供任何地方的大学生使用的在线教科书来帮助计算领域变得更加公平。该项目是斯沃斯莫尔学院和美国军事学院之间的一项合作努力，将继续开发一个免费的、关于计算系统的在线教科书，包括系统软件和计算机体系结构基础。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，允许学生使用一个名为Runestone Interactive的开源NSF资助项目进行知识检查。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。作为第三个目标，计算机科学教育社区的力量将被用来创建丰富的教师材料。最后，教科书章节将增加短视频可视化的关键概念和例子。该项目每年将开发、实施和评估侧重于六个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较小的子主题重点小组中工作，其中包括C编程主题（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。该项目的评估计划将采用定量和定性方法。按照先前工作中早期采用者评估的模式，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。该奖项反映了NSF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。

项目成果

A Free Online Textbook Introducing Computer Architecture Topics

介绍计算机体系结构主题的免费在线教科书

• 发表时间: 2023
• 期刊: Workshop on Computer Architecture Education
• 作者: Newhall, Tia;Matthews, Suzanne J;Webb, Kevin C
• 通讯作者: Webb, Kevin C