Oren Laadan
Jason Nieh
ABSTRACT
Students learn more through hands-on project experience for computer science courses such as operating systems, but providing the infrastructure support for a large class to learn by doing can be hard. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach to managing and grading operating system homework assignments based on virtual appliances, a distributed version control system, and live demonstrations. Our solution is easy to deploy and use with students' personal computers, and obviates the need to provide a computer laboratory for teaching purposes. It supports the most demanding course projects, such as those that involve operating system kernel development, and can be used by both on-campus and remote distance learning students even with intermittent network connectivity. Our experiences deploying and using this solution to teach operating systems at Columbia University show that it is easier to use, more flexible, and more pedagogically effective than other approaches.
- J. C. Adams and W. D. Laverell. Configuring a Multicourse Lab for System-Level Projects. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb. 2005. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- W. Christopher, S. Proctor, and T. Anderson. The Nachos Instructional Operating System. http://cs.berkeley.edu/~tea/nachos/nachos.ps.Google Scholar
- D. A. Holland, A. T. Lim, and M. I. Seltzer. A New Instructional Operating System. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2002, pages 111--115, Feb. 2002. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Nieh and Özgür Can Leonard. Examining VMware. Dr. Dobb's Journal, pages 70--76, Aug. 2000.Google Scholar
- J. Nieh and C. Vaill. Experiences Teaching Operating Systems Using Virtual Platforms and Linux. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb. 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- B. Pfaff, A. Romano, and G. Back. The Pintos Instructional Operating System Kernel. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2009, Chattanooga, TN, Mar. 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. L. Reid and G. V. Wilson. Learning by Doing: Introducing Version Control as a Way to Manage Student Assignments. In Proceedings of SIGCSE 2005, St. Louis, MO, Feb. 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Tanenbaum. A UNIX Clone with Source Code for Operating Systems Courses. Operating Systems Review, 21(1):20--29, Jan. 1987. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Teaching operating systems using virtual appliances and distributed version control
Recommendations
Teaching operating systems using android
SIGCSE '12: Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science EducationThe computing landscape is shifting towards mobile devices. To learn about operating systems, it is increasingly important for students to gain hands-on kernel programming experience in these environments, which are quite different from traditional ...
Experiences teaching operating systems using virtual platforms and linux
SIGCSE '05: Proceedings of the 36th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science educationOperating system courses teach students much more when they provide hands-on kernel-level project experience with a real operating system. However, enabling a large class of students to do kernel development can be difficult. To address this problem, we ...
Experiences teaching operating systems using virtual platforms and Linux
Operating system courses teach students much more when they provide hands-on kernel-level project experience with a real operating system. However, enabling a large class of students to do kernel development can be difficult. To address this problem, we ...
Reviews
Elliot Jaffe
This practical experience report is based on systems courses at Columbia University. The authors explain that dedicated computing resources, such as course server farms and time-sharing systems, are no longer necessary for many practical computer science courses. As they note, most students have very capable laptops that run virtualization services, such as VMware, reasonably well. Courses at Columbia provide basic minimal images that students can download and install on their own machines. The students can then modify the images. While virtual images allow each student to work at home, there remains the challenge of submitting these changes to the course administrators. A Git distributed version control system is used to collect the changes. Each student creates a branch, and all of the updates are permanently logged. The administrators can view submission logs to determine when each update was submitted, which allows them to ignore any changes made after the submission deadline. Interestingly, even with all of these tools, the courses found it necessary to use live demonstrations as the final proof that students had actually performed the exercises and understood the material. In addition, the use of the students' laptops for the demonstrations reduced the load on the graders, because each project did not need to be recompiled and installed on the graders' systems. Read this paper if you run a systems course, programming or otherwise. The use of virtualized images is a major improvement over dedicated managed hardware and software systems. Online Computing Reviews Service
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