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[ptp-dev] PTP as the development basis for a didactic environment about teaching parallel programming to novices

Hello Greg,

My name is Constantinos Delistavrou. Since January 2010 I'm a PhD student at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki, Greece) under the supervision of Prof. K.G. Margaritis (Parallel Distributed Processing Laboratory, Department of Applied Informatics > http://www.it.uom.gr/). Our research is about parallel processing tools for teaching parallel programming. We aim at the use of real life tools and real life target systems for teaching parallel programming to novice students.

Since the beginning of our effort we surveyed parallel processing tools that can be used for teaching parallel programming (programming environments, debuggers, performance analysis, simulation, visualization tools). We focus on open source tools and for a number of reasons we chose Eclipse and PTP as the basis for development and implementation of a teaching/didactic platform to support our goals.

Since we found no other eclipse plugin for parallel programming education we think about developing the means for this purpose (new plugin, interface improvements, etc). A characteristics analysis is used to propose a research and development framework, for the support of teaching parallel programming, on real life target systems, using production oriented software environments.

During the aforementioned survey we tried to encode a number of candidate for implementation functions towards PTP's educational usage. It's not our purpose to implement each and every one of these features. We will try to implement some of them as we think that they will give PTP a parallel programming education perspective. To name a few:

  1. Ability to save the history of actions during compilation and execution.
  2. Ability to create compilation and execution reports based on the saved history without the need of re-compiling and re-executing the source code.
  3. Hellenization of the user interface and adaptation to the student's parallel programming awareness.
  4. Tracing and explanation of bottlenecks, dead-ends, and other possible inconsistencies (This is already developed. It was introduced in version 3.0.0 of PTP, released on December 4, 2009 as “In-situ Partial Order (ISP) Analysis”).
  5. Implementation of wizards for parallel programming step by step guidance.
  6. Creation of interactive theory presentation and exercises.
  7. Representation and clarification of code execution using multimedia.
  8. Implementation of analytic (parallel programming education oriented) help system.
  9. Implementation of a ready to use parallel code samples library.
  10. Ability to develop parallel code through graphical programming.
  11. Implementation of a simulation system.
  12. Implementation of an experiments management system.
  13. Ability to produce novice-friendly interactive reports and visualizations.
  14. Extra-detailed debugging aids for source code and data structures in memory.

The next step of our research is the selective development of these candidate features for the implementation of a didactic environment based mainly on Eclipse PTP. Other tasks are, the experimentation in a larger scale using real life programming examples that are normally used in teaching environments, usability hands-on labs.

So, I would like to inform you and the whole PTP community about our research intentions and to ask for any valuable piece of relevant information (like other people interested in such projects, tips about how to kick-start such features development, and so on).

Best regards,
Constantinos


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