A pilot workshop was held at the Tennessee Tech University campus on June 20-21. The pilot workshop was attended by faculty from 10 regional University systems.
The widespread deployment of multicore and GPU-based systems in recent years has far-reaching ramifications for computer science and is motivating computer science teachers to re-think how they approach the fundamentals of computation. Unfortunately, although a few CS programs offer a parallel computing class as an upper division elective, very few CS programs introduce PDC in the introductory programming classes (CS1 and CS2).
The overall goal of this workshop is to prepare CS under-graduate students for their future careers in light of the technological shifts towards parallelism by improving faculty expertise in PDC and providing them resources to integrate PDC topics in introductory programming classes. This hands-on training workshop will introduce PDC concepts that follow TCPP curriculum guidelines, and programming tools to reinforce those concepts, and is targeted for CS1 and CS2 instructors whose main teaching/research expertise is not PDC. Hands-on modules appropriate to CS1 and CS2 will be selected from successful PDC integration efforts (some funded by NSF).