CDER Center · NSF Award #2321015
Modern software is parallel, distributed, event-driven and API-based. Introductory computing mostly still isn’t. Eight institutions changed that in their own CS1, then measured whether it worked, and published everything.
Early release
Start from your adoption goal
This volume is designed for selective reading. You do not need to read every chapter before finding something usable.
Start with Chapter 1 and look for an unplugged, visual or short discussion-based activity. Often one 40–60 minute session with printed handouts.
Browse activities →Read the common description, then compare two or three institutional chapters with constraints similar to yours — class size, calendar, language, prep time.
Compare exemplars →Scan the descriptor elements and course-change sections, study the chapters closest to your local course, then work from the appendices and repositories.
Chapter 0 — roadmap →Featured e-book
Students regularly use applications that depend on multicore processors, remote services, asynchronous events, large data streams and libraries that hide complex computation. Yet many do not learn these ideas formally until advanced electives, if at all.
This volume responds with a practical adoption guide for instructors, course coordinators, departments and academic leaders. Rather than only arguing that introductory courses should be modernized, it provides classroom-tested, modular course materials that can be adopted at different scales.
The goal is not to turn introductory computing students into parallel programmers, but to help them develop an early conceptual model in which computation may involve multiple workers, remote data, performance trade-offs and coordination among interacting components — all while ensuring that the basic CS1 learning outcomes are preserved.
Recurring activity families
Rather than another local course implementation, Chapter 1 identifies the activity families that recur across all eight institutions, adapted to different languages, calendars and class sizes.
Students act as processors coloring flag-grid cells in sequential and parallel scenarios. Surfaces speedup, task decomposition, contention, pipelining, critical path and race conditions — with paper and markers.
40–60 min · 5 institutions · See materials
Students search or sort pennies under sequential, balanced-parallel and load-imbalanced scenarios, then compare measured times against ideal speedup.
Fits a 50- or 75-min class · 4 institutions · See materials
Parallel search, parallel linked lists, flag coloring and Zombie Attack — codeless visuals that need no setup and no programming background, with prediction before code.
10–15 min each · See materials
Students retrieve live USGS data, parse JSON, filter events and display results — distributed data access against a real service instead of parsing console text.
~1.25 hours · 3 institutions · See materials
A few pragmas on array creation, summing or sorting, plus benchmarking — high conceptual return for very little added cognitive load.
One lab plus homework · See materials
Code attached to sprites and invoked by system events rather than called from main,
ending in open-ended student games.
75-min demo to a full project · 4 institutions · See materials
Partners
No single model fits all languages, calendars, class sizes, student populations or instructor backgrounds. The diversity is the point.
Get in touch
The material is free and needs no permission to use. Tell us what you are considering and we can point you at the right chapter, help you scope a first adoption, or arrange a short consultation.
Knowing where the exemplars travel also lets the project report to NSF.
Prefer plain email? Write to contact@nsfexemplar.cdercenter.org.
