Modernizing Early CS Courses with Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Parallel and distributed computing (PDC) is now a pervasive aspect of deployed systems, and thus it is essential that students include parallelism and distribution in the computational thinking that they apply to problem solving, from the very beginning. Our students all have multicore laptops. Most of their favorite applications use vast numbers of distributed processors. Why are we still teaching them to solve problems using only sequential thinking? Come to this workshop to see how easy it is to open their eyes to exploiting concurrency in problem solving, starting in their earliest courses. You'll hear about and experience some unplugged activities, learn how to help students recognize examples of concurrency in the world around them, see how event driven user interfaces can easily exemplify issues related to multithreading, and how freely available libraries can be used to naturally exploit parallelism in working with large data structures. We will also highlight the two summer training programs that we are organizing, for which we have funding to support attendance by instructors. Having a laptop that can run Java and C++ will allow you to follow along with some code examples, but isn't necessary.