Making parallel programming accessible to inexperienced programmers through cooperative learning

Abstract

This paper describes how we utilized cooperative learning to meet the practical challenges of teaching parallel programming in the early college years, as well as to provide a more real world context to the course. Our main contribution is a set of cooperative group activities for both inside and outside the classroom, which are targeted to the computer science discipline, have received very positive student feedback, are easy to implement, and achieve a number of learning objectives beyond knowledge of the specific topic. These activities can be applied directly or be easily adapted to other computer science courses, particularly programming, systems, and experimental computer science courses.