Teaching PDC in the Time of COVID: Hands-on Materials for Remote Learning

Abstract

In response to shifts in the hardware foundations of computing, parallel and distributed computing (PDC) is now a key piece of the core CS curriculum. For CS educators, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting switch to remote-learning add new challenges to the tasks of helping learners understand abstract PDC concepts and equipping them with hands-on practical skills. This paper presents several novel teaching materials for teaching PDC remotely, including: (i) using a Runestone Interactive "virtual" handout to learn how to run OpenMP multithreaded programs on a Raspberry Pi, and (ii) using Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks to run mpi4py instances on remote systems and thus learn about MPI distributed multiprocessing. The authors piloted these strategies during a multi-day faculty development workshop on teaching PDC. Assessment data indicates that the materials greatly aided professional development and preparedness to teach PDC.