A Multi-Level Study of Undergraduate Computer Science Reasoning about Concurrency

Lawson, Aubrey; Kraemer, Eileen; Che, S. Megan; Kennedy, Cazembe

doi:10.1145/3304221.3319763

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The first part of the work focuses on analyzing solutions to concurrency problems and interviews to understand what areas students struggle with. The results, which are similar to other work [53,54], indicate that students have a general idea of the problems that arise in concurrent programming but struggle to address them properly. This might be due to many reasons, for example that students are content with solutions that only work most of the time [51], or that students struggle with more fundamental concepts, such as scope, parameter passing, and references [32], that prevent them from being able to reason about the behavior of concurrent programs properly.…”

Section: Chapter 12 Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…In summary, this chapter presented results from six papers that all aimed to better understand which aspects of concurrency students struggle with and suggest areas that would be useful to focus on in order to help students in the future. The first paper presented (paper I) showed that many students fail to synchronize a simple concurrency problem adequately, similarly to other research [54,57]. Since these results also indicated that a part of the problem might be students' proficiency with prerequisite skills, paper III investigated the impact of such prerequisites more closely and found that core concepts such as parameters, references and scope are indeed important when working with concurrent programming.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…They found that students at the start of their introductory CS course were aware of the issues in general, but that they were not able to propose suitable solutions in general. Lawson et al [54] found similar results in their investigation of students in the first four years of an undergraduate program. Finally, Lawson and Kraemer [53] used another similar problem to investigate the kinds of solutions students arrived at in a course on concurrency.…”

Section: Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programmingmentioning

confidence: 57%

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Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programming in the Shared Memory Model

Strömbäck

2023

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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The performance of computational devices is steadily increasing. Recently, the main contributor to the increasing performance has been an increasing number of cores rather than increased performance for individual cores. This trend is not only visible in high-end devices, such as powerful workstations, but also in low-end devices such as smartphones and many embedded devices. Due to this trend, and to the ubiquity of multicore systems, it is increasingly important for computer science students to have at least some familiarity with working with concurrent programs, as they are likely to encounter such programs in some shape or form in their future professional careers. In this thesis, we use the term concurrent programming to emphasize the focus on concurrency in a programming context, as opposed to concurrency in isolation.Prior work has shown that students struggle with learning concurrent programming. This is not surprising in and of itself, as concurrency is generally considered to be a difficult topic. To help students learn concurrent programming, it is important to consider why they find the topic difficult. As such, the first part of this thesis aims to gain better insights into these difficulties. This is done partly by studying prior work in the literature and partly by conducting new research. The results show that the struggles are not only due to the difficulty involved in understanding the new concepts related to concurrency. Rather, a large portion of students' struggles can be attributed to the fact that the non-determinism in concurrent programs requires a more formal approach to programming. The transition from an informal approach, where students are able to rely on ad-hoc testing, to a more formal approach is difficult in and of itself, but it also highlights problems in students' understanding of fundamental programming skills. For example, without a detailed enough understanding of scope, aliasing and references it is difficult to reason about what data is shared between threads.In light of these results, the remainder of this thesis describes ways of helping students learn concurrent programming. This is achieved by developing a program visualization tool, called Progvis, which is capable of visualizing the behavior of concurrent programs written in the C language. Progvis is unique in the sense that it focuses not only on concurrency, but also illustrates how concurrency interacts with the fundamental concepts that were found to be problematic. As such, it is able to give students a complete and accurate picture of the visualized program's behavior. To further help students, Progvis also includes a modelchecker that can automatically find concurrency issues, thereby helping students to easily see whether their reasoning about the program's behavior was correct or not.The results suggest that the visualizations generated by Progvis have the potential to help students learn concurrent programming. A small pilot study showed that students who used Progvis were able to solve concurrency proble...

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Section: Chapter 12 Conclusionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programmingmentioning

confidence: 57%

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Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programming in the Shared Memory Model

Strömbäck

2023

Linköping Studies in Science and Technology. Dissertations

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“…One such example is Lewandowski et al (2007), who used the problem to study what students know about concurrency before having formal instruction and found that students see the problems, even though they are not always able to find suitable solutions. Another example is Lawson et al (2019), who studied what types of solutions are suggested by undergraduate students in four different years of their education. The authors found that students at all levels were able to identify the issues and found a number of different approaches to solve the problem.…”

Section: Learning Concurrencymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Non-Deterministic Path to Concurrency – Exploring how Students Understand the Abstractions of Concurrency

Strömbäck¹,

Mannila²,

Kamkar³

2021

Informatics in Education

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Concurrency is often perceived as difficult by students. One reason for this may be due to the fact that abstractions used in concurrent programs leave more situations undefined compared to sequential programs (e.g., in what order statements are executed), which makes it harder to create a proper mental model of the execution environment. Students who aim to explore the abstractions through testing are further hindered by the non-determinism of concurrent programs since even incorrect programs may seem to work properly most of the time. In this paper we aim to explore how students' understanding these abstractions by examining 137 solutions to two concurrency questions given on the final exam in two years of an introductory concurrency course. To highlight problematic areas of these abstractions, we present alternative abstractions under which each incorrect solution would be correct.

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Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education

Oleson

Solomon

2020

Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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A Multi-Level Study of Undergraduate Computer Science Reasoning about Concurrency

Cited by 8 publications

References 12 publications

Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programming in the Shared Memory Model

Teaching and Learning Concurrent Programming in the Shared Memory Model

The Non-Deterministic Path to Concurrency – Exploring how Students Understand the Abstractions of Concurrency

Computing Students' Learning Difficulties in HCI Education

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