Original Author/link
Chitra P (iPDC Modules)
Similar Activities
FindOldestPenny, FindSmallestCard
CS2013 Knowledge Unit Coverage
PD/Parallel Decomposition Core Tier 1
2. Identify opportunities to partition a serial program into independent parallel modules. [Familiarity]
TCPP Topics Coverage
Algorithms Topics
- Know Selection: Observe algorithms for finding order statistics, notably min and max. Understand that selection can always be accomplished by sorting but that direct algorithms may be simpler. (0.5 hours)
Recommend Courses
- K-12: This is an activity that can easily be done with K-12 students.
- CS0/CS1/CS2: The authors recommend introduction of the topic in these undergraduate courses. The activity is easily scaled for large undergraduate classrooms.
- DSA: TCPP recommends that DSA is a good place to introduce the concept of selection.
Accessibility:
This activity seems appropriate for most populations.
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Deaf students can participate by signing the their age to their partner or assistant.
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Blind students can participate by calling out their age.
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Students can stay in their seats, making it appropriate for students who are mobility-impaired.
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Students who are deaf and blind may have issues with this activity. Braille readers can be given a description of the prompt “state your age”; the response can then be communicated to the people next to them.
Assessment
Yes. This activity was assessed in an undergraduate PDC course in India (Chitra 2019), and CS1 and CS2 classes at Tennessee Tech (Ghafoor2019). In all cases, the unplugged activities were used to introduce students to the parallel concepts prior to “hands-on” programming exercises. The assessment results in both papers suggest that unplugged activities are a successful first start to teaching PDC computing concepts.
Citations
- P. Chitra and S. K. Ghafoor, “Activity based approach for teaching parallel computing: An Indian experience”, in 2019 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW), May 2019, pp. 290–295.
- S. K. Ghafoor, D. W. Brown, M. Rogers, and T. Hines, “Unplugged activities to introduce parallel computing in introductory programming classes: An experience report”, in Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE'19). New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2019, pp. 309–309. [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3304221.3325573
- S. K. Ghafoor, M. Rogers, D. Brown, and A. Haynes, “ipdc modules (unplugged)” last accessed Oct 16, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.csc.tntech.edu/pdcincs/index.php/ipdc-modules/