Collaborative Research: CyberTraining: Implementation: Small: Integrating core CI literacy and skills into university curricula via simulation-driven activities

Scientific and societal progress in the 21st century relies on a large, heterogeneous, and evolving ecosystem of Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) technologies. And yet, most college students graduating today from computing curricula have little exposure to PDC concepts and practices. There is thus an imminent risk that the emerging scientific workforce will be ill-prepared for using and developing those computing infrastructures that are key to progress. Teaching PDC early and effectively in university curricula is notoriously difficult, in part due to the need to provide students with access to and meaningful hands-on learning opportunities on actual PDC platforms. This project addresses this challenge directly by relying on simulation technology: it provides students with hands-on learning opportunities that do not require access to any PDC platforms. This makes it possible to teach the full gamut of PDC conceptual and practical topics effectively and at any higher education institution in the nation. The pedagogic activities being developed in this project can be integrated into existing university courses and also provide a sound basis for developing new courses, starting at freshman levels. By supporting education in a view to modernizing the scientific workforce, this project promotes the progress of science, as stated by NSF's mission.

Years of Cyberinfrastructure research and development have resulted in a rich set of abstractions and interoperable software implementations that can leverage a wide range of hardware platforms. It is crucial to provide students with hands-on pedagogic activities through which they can acquire the PDC conceptual and practical knowledge necessary for them to join a workforce that develops and uses this Cyberinfrastructure. Requiring that these activities be conducted on actual hardware and software stacks limits participation because only few institutions have access to secure representative, stable, and possibly large deployments that can be used for educational purposes. The main insight behind this work is that simulation promotes both participation and pedagogy because it allows students to experience arbitrary Cyberinfrastructure scenarios, only requiring that they have access to a standard laptop computer. This is feasible due to the recent development of simulation frameworks for easily developing simulators of complex distributed systems that afford simulations that are both pedagogically accurate and scalable. Given this insight and this recent development, this project develops simulation-driven interactive pedagogic activities for a spectrum of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), ranging from standard PDC SLOs as well as SLOs relevant to current and emerging Cyberinfrastructure practices. The activities are organized in modules with a prerequisite structure, and come with guidelines for integration into existing university courses, starting at freshman levels. Several pedagogic strategies are employed through which students execute interactive simulations with configurable levels of details along various narrative paths. Research questions include determining which strategies, with which levels of simulation details, work best for which SLOs.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.