A Modern Student Experience inSystems Programming

Abstract

The study of Operating Systems and Systems Programming provides invaluable software engineering experience and crucial conceptual understanding that make it an essential component of an undergraduate computer science curriculum. It is also imperative that classroom course material and infrastructure keep pace with rapidly evolving technology. A "modern" course will provide an accurate software engineering experience and prevent the study of outdated concepts. With the recent increase in size and popularity of computer science courses, all course material must also be appropriately scalable. In order to create such a "modern" systems course, we redesigned UC Berkeley's CS 162, a 300 student Introduction to Operating Systems & Systems Programming course. In this paper we detail our unique curriculum layout, our advanced infrastructure support for students, and future work on extending our infrastructure for other large computer science courses