Cloud in a cloud for cloud education

Yokoyama,; Yoshioka, Nobukazu; Shida,

doi:10.1109/pesos.2012.6225943

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Other examples within this area include for instance offering e‐learning for health care within a cloud system (cf Suciu et al), using CloudStack to offer educational resources (cf Wu and Huang), training advanced users to deploy openstack cloud services within a cloud architecture, or use the cloud to offer computing services to students . Sometimes the educational advantages of cloud computing are also followed by other reasons that are useful in the educational domain, like using the cloud to make educational applications scalable and available also via Amazon's SimpleDB, or just to save costs …”

Section: Big Data Parkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning the way to the cloud: Big Data Park

Marchiori

2017

Concurrency and Computation

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Big data and cloud systems are two crucial components of modern computing, but they are also a challenge to learn, as they change the basic assumptions of computing, and as such the mental habits that are proper of classical computing teaching. In other words, beyond a technical revolution, we first and foremost are in the presence of a mental revolution. For this reason, we think it is essential to help students to change their mental habits as early as possible and become familiar with at least the basic notions of distributed storage and cloud computing. In this paper, we introduce the Big Data Park system, which has been developed with an ambitious task in mind: gently introduce K-12 kids to the basics of big data and cloud computing, helping them to be part of this revolution. We report on the creation of the system, the challenges, and also the impact on higher K-18 education. The results, extensively tested in the field with a wide variety of kids and children, have been extremely successful, thanks also to advanced educational techniques like gamification.Moreover, the development and testing of the project have also provided valuable insights for the general problem of education of big data computing. INTRODUCTIONBig data and cloud computing are rapidly becoming an essential part of our technology infrastructure: In fact, their wide adoption has been seen as quite an epochal revolution, a new form of mind passing from single-machines computation to fully distributed computation and storage. This paradigm shift is so important also because it is to some extent counter-intuitive to the basic notions of programming that are classically learned around the world. When students are first introduced to big data programming, they often experience an initial resistance, given the educational background that limits their thinking flexibility.It is for these reasons that we have started the development of an online educational tool for big data and cloud computing. Computer-assisted tools can greatly help students and are a field in continuous expansion, given the great benefits they can provide in the educational paths (see for instance other works 1-6 ). However, building a successful educational tool is a rather challenging task, also because its success critically depends on the age of the subjects. The goal of the system that we have built, named Big Data Park (an improvement of the system first described in Marchiori 7 ), is to be able to educate students even from their very early stages: More specifically, covering the full spectrum of K-12 education. We feel this is a crucial step, in order to start shaping the minds of the kids already at their very early stage, therefore freeing their minds and allowing them to understand as early as possible the big changes in thought that are part of the big data and cloud computing revolution. Complementary, we also tried to build up a system that was general enough not to be used by K-12 kids, but possibly also useful in higher education, more specifically even at K-...

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