Teaching Parallel Programming to Freshmen in an Undergraduate Computer Science Program

This Research to Practice Full Paper proposes a teaching approach that introduces parallel programming early in the undergraduate Computer Science curriculum. Experiments were conducted to freshmen in the second course of algorithms and data structures. The strategy for the evaluation of the early education of parallel programming includes the use of OpenMP Application Programming Interface and sorting algorithms. The results indicate that students improved their skills by participating in parallel programing activities introduced at early stages or even at the very beginning of the undergraduate program. Freshmen could hit about 92%, 63% and 44% of easy, medium and hard questions after theoretical and practice activities. This represents an improvement about 19%, 14% and 39% for each respective difficulty level in comparison to the beginning of the study when all freshmen had no knowledge relative to parallel programming. These results aid to demystify parallel programming and to show that freshmen can learn it.