Teaching experimental design in an operating systems class

  • Authors:

  • Allen B. Downey

  • Affiliations:

  • Colby College, 5830 Mayflower Hill, Waterville, ME

  • Venue:
  • SIGCSE '99 The proceedings of the thirtieth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

This paper describes an operating systems (OS) class that departs from more common approaches by introducing experimental design explicitly as part of the course material. Instead of implementing operating systems components or modifying existing operating systems, students conduct a series of experiments that measure the performance of system services and try to infer information about their implementation from the results. These experiments reinforce the OS concepts presented in lecture, and also develop a set of skills that students need for a wide range of activities: formulating and testing hypotheses, analyzing and presenting data, and writing.