The significant expense of modern college textbooks limits availability to those who can afford them. As computational thinking and programming increasingly become desired skills, the computing community needs low-cost curricular materials to make computing courses available to all students. Online curricular materials are readily available for introductory programming courses. However, such resources for later computing courses are comparatively rare. To address this need, we developed Dive into Systems, a free, online textbook for teaching introductory computer systems topics. We are concluding our final year of a multi-year NSF grant to augment Dive into Systems with dynamic visualizations, interactive exercises, worked examples, and instructor portal content. Our project has been community-focused throughout, and an important component of our grant is getting the community involved in helping to design interactive exercises for students and supplemental resources for instructors.

In previous affiliated events, we received invaluable community input on interactive exercise development for various systems topics, and recruited exercise developers. This year’s event will instead focus on sharing with the Computer Science Education community the rich assortment of materials for teaching computer systems topics, hearing how others use these materials in a range of computer systems courses, and discussing issues that students face today in learning systems topics. The Dive into Systems project has the potential to help the field of computing become more equitable by developing a high-quality, free, online textbook that can be used by college students anywhere. Learn more at the Dive into Systems webpage.

Please join us if you are interested in computer systems and learning about the resources provided by the Dive into Systems project, if you have experiences to share about your use or ideas about how to use its free, online resources in your classes, if you have materials to share with the community, if you want to hear and share ideas about teaching systems topics and the future of computer systems education.

We anticipate participants will be CS educators who are current or past exercise developers for Dive into Systems, faculty who currently use (or are interested in using) Dive into Systems textbook and interactive tools and exercises for their courses, faculty who are interested in discussing new strategies to teach computer systems topics to their students, those who are interested in discussing future directions and challenges in computer systems

If you are interested in attending, please RSVP using the following link: link: Affiliated Event Registration

The event organizers are the three authors of Dive into Systems, and lead the Dive into Systems project (diveintosystems.org), which is currently funded on a multi-year NSF grant and received a 2019 SIGCSE Special Projects Grant.

Cost-effective computing materials are needed to make computer systems content accessible to everyone. The ACM-IEEE CS2023 Curriculum recommends at least 39 hours of systems coverage across the System Fundamentals (SF), Architecture & Organization (AR), Parallel & Distributed Computing (PDC) and Operating Systems (OS) knowledge areas. The NSF/IEEE-TCPP Curriculum Initiative curricular guidelines further specify expanded coverage of core systems and PDC topics. To help make these concepts accessible to everyone, we developed Dive into Systems, a free, online textbook for teaching computer systems, architecture and PDC for students with only a CS1 background. Dive into Systems was awarded a SIGCSE 2019 Special Projects Grant, which we used to run an early adopter program in the 2019-2020 academic year.

In 2022, this project was awarded an NSF grant to expand the book with interactive elements to better serve students and faculty. Research in Education demonstrates that learning is an active endeavor. Web-based learning materials offer new forms of dynamic and interactive content with the potential to transform computer science education. Prior work has shown that students spend significantly more time with course materials that include dynamic visualizations compared to text alone. Students also voluntarily complete additional interactive exercises, even after meeting requirements for course credit. The literature strongly supports our belief that augmenting Dive into Systems with interactive exercises will facilitate student understanding of systems topics.

For the duration of the grant, we conducted annual meetings at the SIGCSE conference that presented completed work, brainstormed ways to create and improve new and existing interactive materials, and recruited the exercise developers that play a central role in our project. We have hosted affiliated events at SIGCSE for three previous years, and believed the sessions were very informative for both our attendees and ourselves.

The primary goals of this year’s event are to present the results of this project and discuss how its resources are used by faculty in diverse contexts, to discuss future directions for computer systems education, and to brainstorm ways to teach computer systems topics going forward.

While not required, participants are strongly recommended to bring a laptop to participate in activities.

Mail us at authors@diveintosystems.org with any questions.