Virtualized games for teaching about distributed systems

Abstract

Complex distributed systems are increasingly important in modern computer science, yet many undergraduate curricula do not give students the opportunity to develop the skill sets necessary to grapple with the complexity of such systems. We have developed and integrated into an undergraduate elective course on parallel and distributed computing a teaching tool that may help students develop these skill sets. The tool uses virtualization to ease the burden of resourcing and configuring complex systems for student study, and creates varied "firefighting" gaming scenarios in which students compete to keep the system up and running in the presence of multiple issues. Preliminary experience indicates that (1) students find the tool engaging and (2) it is a manageable way in which to give students a novel perspective on interaction with complex distributed systems.

Have We Reached Consensus? An Analysis of Distributed Systems Syllabi

“…Others have contributed to education research in DS by describing innovative projects for DS courses [1,2,50,52] and studying how to ease the process of grading distributed algorithms assignments [34]. Szabo [45] studied if final year undergraduates building a complex distributed system meet desired graduate outcomes.…”

A Web-based Didactic Tool for Teaching of Distributed Consensus

“…Interactive Tools for Learning Sensor Network Basics [3] is a tool used to show the nodes in a network as intelligent autonomous sensors, which can measure certain characteristics of their environment, such as temperature, pressure, humidity, acceleration, etc. Wireless sensor networks [4] have a wide range of applications: climate monitoring, flood prevention, seismic monitoring, early detection of forest fires, etc. This tool is useful for master's students interested in wireless sensor networks as a research topic for their thesis, but who do not know enough to make a rational choice.…”

PlanetLab@UOC: A real lab over the Internet to experiment with distributed systems

“…Furthermore, they provide an environment that can be easily controlled and reproduced if necessary, so that different scenarios can be analyzed. They are used sometimes in a metaphoric gameplay of distributed application stability, like the PDConsole environment 9. However, network simulators are difficult to configure so that they could offer a realistic behavior of individual components in large‐scale distributed systems. Real‐life experimental platforms allow students to deal with intrinsic problems of distributed systems, for example: application deployment, resource discovery, and resource management.…”