Demystifying Distributed Systems with a Storytelling Method

On a daily basis, the general public uses online services without any knowledge of the concepts these services rely on. Even though this is fine most of the time, there are situations where such obliviousness puts the users in trouble. We aim to popularize key distributed systems concepts and make them accessible to K-16 students, so as to give future generations a better idea of what to expect of online services. This should help make better decisions regarding when to use them, and when to trust them. We adopt the method of storytelling and embed distributed systems concepts into an interactive story available on the Internet. Our preliminary assessment on CS1 students shows that our interactive game may have a positive effect on their overall grasp of the embedded notions. The effect is marginal, but our study provides interesting insights on how to make the technique effective.