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Commonsense computing (episode 3): concurrency and concert tickets

Published: 15 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

As the third in a series of projects investigating commonsense computing -- the relevant knowledge that students have before any formal study of computing -- we examine students' commonsense understanding of concurrency. Specifically, we replicated (with modifications) an experiment by Ben-David Kolikant. [2] Ben-David Kolikant's data were gathered from high-school seniors who had previously studied computing, at the beginning of an advanced class in concurrent and distributed programming. Modifying one of her questions to reflect our students' lack of background, we asked students at five different institutions, in the first week of CS1, to describe in English the problems that might arise when more than one person is selling seats to a concert.
Almost all students (97%) identified the problem of interest -- that a race condition may occur between sellers. 73% of students identified at least one possible solution. We found that the categorizations developed by Ben-David Kolikant were also meaningful when applied to our data, that our beginning CS1 students are more likely to give centralized solutions (as opposed to decentralized ones) than Ben-David Kolikant's concurrency students, and that the granularity of solutions is finer among the more experienced students.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '07: Proceedings of the third international workshop on Computing education research
September 2007
172 pages
ISBN:9781595938411
DOI:10.1145/1288580
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 September 2007

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Author Tags

  1. CS1
  2. beginners
  3. concurrency
  4. constructivism
  5. novices
  6. preconceptions
  7. resources

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ICER07
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ICER07: International Computing Education Research Workshop
September 15 - 16, 2007
Georgia, Atlanta, USA

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ICER '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 14 of 24 submissions, 58%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

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  • (2023)Using Model-Checking and Peer-Grading to Provide Automated Feedback to Concurrency Exercises in ProgvisProceedings of the 25th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3576123.3576125(11-20)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
  • (2022)A Weak Memory Model in Progvis: Verification and Improved Accuracy of Visualizations of Concurrent Programs to Aid Student LearningProceedings of the 22nd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3564721.3565947(1-12)Online publication date: 17-Nov-2022
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  • (2022)Play Your Cards RightProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499343(857-863)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Achieving CSforAll: Preparing Special Education Pre-service Teachers to Bring Computing to Students with DisabilitiesProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499333(196-201)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
  • (2021)A Semblance of Similarity: Student Categorisation of Simple Algorithmic Problem StatementsProceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research10.1145/3446871.3469745(198-212)Online publication date: 16-Aug-2021
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  • (2020)Differentiated Assessments for Advanced Courses that Reveal Issues with Prerequisite SkillsProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3437800.3439204(75-129)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2020
  • (2020)GPU Programming Productivity in Different Abstraction ParadigmsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/341830120:4(1-27)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2020
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