publication 2
Broad Awareness of Unseen Work on a Concurrency-based Assignment
Authors: Prasun Dewan, Samuel George, Bowen Gu, Zhizhou Liu, Hao Wang, and Andrew Wortas
Published on: The 3rd Workshop on Education for High Performance Computing (EduHiPC 2021)
In this paper, we use different technologies to record events related to work on a Java assignment that exercised threads, synchronization, and coordination and provide preliminary answers to questions about the unseen work behind the concurrency aspects of the assignment, which helps instructors improve the learning effectiveness of the students. We used the Piazza discussion forum, the Zoom conferencing system, an Eclipse plugin, and a testing framework to record data about the Java assignment. We analyze students’ difficulties during the assignment based on 4 different categories: threads, synchronization, coordination, and other. We track certain students’ performance by exploring the correlation between the students’ utilization of office hour visits, the utilization of testing tools, and their assignment grades.
The full paper is available at IEEE Xplore.
An illustration video (10 mins) is available here.