Hands-on activities are important for computer science students to achieve their learning objectives. Compared to developing and maintaining on-campus physical or virtual laboratories, using the public cloud to host hands-on activities is a very promising approach because of the scalability, flexibility, security, costefficiency, and accessibility of the services offered in the public cloud. This paper presents the design of four cloud-based network programming projects and our experience of using the services and infrastructure in the public cloud for these hands-on projects in our Computer Networks course. Each student was able to use multiple virtual machines in the public cloud together with a local computer to develop and test networking programs. Both the instructor's observation and student surveys demonstrated that our approach has a strong positive impact on the student learning experience. A vast majority of the students favor using the public cloud not only in this course but also in other computer science courses if applicable.
is the Information Technology Security Principal for the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, and is currently working toward his master's of engineering degree in information assurance also from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He has a passion for learning for not only information security concepts and theory, but also current real world technology and zero-day threat models. His passion for education has lead him to help others understand why information security is important and what we can do to defend our information.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.