EcoSim: a language and experience teaching parallel programming in elementary school

Authors:
Chris Gregg;Luther Tychonievich;James Cohoon;Kim Hazelwood
Affiliations:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA;University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Traditional introductory programming classes teach sequential programming using a single-threaded programming model. It is typical to wait until a student has developed proficiency in sequential programming before teaching parallel programming. As computer hardware becomes increasingly parallel, there is a greater need for software engineers who are proficient in designing parallel programs, and not just by "parallelizing" sequential designs. Teaching parallelism first is an important step towards educating tomorrow's programmers. We present an overview of a five-day introductory parallel programming course. We taught the course to nine and ten year-olds with no prior programming experience. Our course utilized a fundamentally parallel language we designed for the course, one with a near-natural language syntax that exposed the parallel processors throughout the code. This language, coupled with an interactive online programming environment, allowed us to teach a wide range of parallel programming concepts in a very limited timeframe. We also present examples of student-written code that demonstrates their understanding of some basic parallel programming concepts, and we describe the overall course goal and specific lesson plans geared towards teaching students how to "think parallel."