A Flipped Classroom Approach to Teaching Concurrency and Parallelism

Concurrency and parallelism are difficult concepts for computer science students, even those who are experienced programmers. The traditional teaching approach of lecturing and giving assignments to be done outside of class can leave students frustrated and unable to complete assignments successfully. The flipped classroom approach promotes collaborative learning during class meetings, with the goal of leading to a clearer understanding of concurrency and parallelism concepts and increased ability to apply and synthesize the knowledge. Outcomes-based assessment has shown improvement over the traditional lecture approach.