Using Programming Projects In An Operating Systems Course As A Capstone Software Engineering Experience

Operating systems course is very important. It is not only the core of computer professional curriculum, but also the base of designing or developing computer system software and application software. However, the practical teaching of operating systems course is difficult. In this article, we introduce the construction of the practical teaching system on operating systems and design a positive experimental environment according to the teaching content through comparing lots of operating systems practical textbooks from the perspective of teaching practice, at last we provide a MOS system for students, they can analyze, modify and extend the functions of MOS to master operating systems concepts and theory.

There is a desperate lack of training in real-time programming in the computer science curriculum. At best, students may write an interrupt driven program in an assembly language course. As a result, a majority of real-time programming in industry is done by enginers who understand hardware but have little training in program development for complex software systems. This paper describes a course project that can be used in an operating systems course or a course in real-time software design. The project development proceeds from the core of a real-time kernel outward to user calls to the kernel. The major components of this project are: the underlying data structures, the scheduler, input and output device drivers, programmer's interfaces to the system, and a series of user programs exercising the system. The original course was developed for an industrial environment where it proved to be quite successful. The project has been adapted for for use both in an operating systems course and a special topics course in real-time programming.

An operating system course draws from a well-defined fundamental theory, but one needs to consider how more recent advances, not necessarily in the theory itself, can be applied to improve the course and the general body of knowledge of the student. The goal of This work is to show how recent software engineering developments can be introduced to such a course to not only satisfy the theory requirements, but also make the theory more understandable. In particular, This work focuses on how students can effectively learn the Unified Modeling Language, the object-oriented methodology, and the Java programming language in the context of an operating systems course. The goal is to form a systematic software engineering process for operating system design and implementation.

An operating system course can be taught with or without a programming project. The author has found that teaching it with a programming project has several advantages. In particular, students gain...

After a long period of stagnation in the last decades of 20th Century Russia started investing into development of IT and engineering education. In 2017 Kazan Federal University launched a novel master program in Intelligent Robotics, which was established based on the analysis of curriculums of world leading universities in robotics field and is being taught in English language. The paper presents result of surveys that were conducted among first year students of Robot Operating System (ROS) course, which serves as a basic backbone of the program. We analyzed dynamics of English language comprehension, self-efficiency, and active learning strategies among students within a semester while highlighting their attitude and motivation to study ROS as a part of robotics education. Special language environment was created during the class that allowed students to obtain positive results of material comprehension in English language. Additionally, a significant increase of motivation in studying robotics was observed among the students.

CPU scheduling is one of the most important topics in operating systems courses. However, the main problem in learning CPU scheduling from textbooks is that textbooks usually simplify the illustration of CPU scheduling algorithms by using an unrealistic process execution model. They also do not give concrete examples when discussing complex algorithms. As a result, students are not able to gain insight into exactly how the algorithms work in real-world operating systems. To address this problem, the author developed an interactive Java-based software tool that uses graphical animation to convey the concepts of various CPU scheduling algorithms for a single CPU. While many existing animation tools were designed to be closely aligned with the content in traditional operating systems textbooks, this tool is uniquely designed and different in a number of respects. In this paper, the impact of the tool on student learning is measured, analyzed and discussed in detail. The tool has been used in two sections of the operating systems course at the author's institute, and has demonstrated effectiveness in assisting student learning of CPU scheduling algorithms.

Since 2019 the COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge changes in our lives. The government's health policies restricted everyday life, especially in schools. In the school year 2021/2022 we had to teach smaller groups face-to-face and later in the semester switch to distance learning. This article focuses on the Operating systems course teaching techniques used during the school year 2021/2022. Operating systems are one of the fundamentals needed for the development of complex UAV systems.

Circumstances - a 5-week course format with two 4-hour evening classes each week - impelled an alternative approach for the introductory operating systems course at Rochester Institute of Technology in summer 2003. We used a co-operative learning approach based loosely on the jigsaw methodology. Students were divided into teams, and each assigned to prepare one subtopic of the material for each course session. Each class consisted of a lecture session, followed by team sessions where each member explained their portion of the lecture material and the team discussed it. This format proved very successful in increasing student involvement and making sure that nearly all students came away with at least a basic understanding of the material. The paper presents the details of the format, challenges faced, positive outcomes and limitations, and data and perspectives from student surveys.

Computer operating system (OS) is one of the most important course of computer science. According to the difficult situation in the teaching of computer operating system course, the article analyses the reasons of main problems in the teaching process, and puts forward a new related teaching method based on association. Firstly, the method regards the computer system as a complete social system, and strengthen the crossing and connection with other courses. Secondly, strengthen the specific association and correspondence between experiments and theoretic. Finally, specific examples are given and explained.

Operating systems is one core course of many computing curricula. However, many students find the course difficult and boring as they cannot practically relate to the inner workings of an operating system. This paper presents an approach which was used in delivering an undergraduate second year introductory operating systems course with the aim of balancing theory and practice in order to keep students motivated in the course. The students, however, did not have sufficient programming background to undertake kernel-level programming projects. The approach, therefore, involved complementing theory lessons with a series of practical tasks spread throughout the whole period of delivery of the course. An evaluation of the course showed that the performance of students taught using this approach was significantly higher than those taught theoretical operating system concepts only. Through a survey, students also expressed strong satisfaction that the approach contributed to a positive learning environment as the students also specifically found the course relevant and well balanced in theory and practice.

It is often difficult to select relevant and reasonable laboratory assignments in an introductory operating systems course. The students are seldom prepared to code intricate portions of an operating system, even if suitable hardware were available for such extensive use. Nevertheless, it is essential that the students gain a quantitative insight into the components and interactions of simple and complex operating systems. An operating system simulator that allows an evaluation of the performances of various operating system configutations without requiring the student to write complicated code would help to solve the dilemma. An operating systems simulator named POPSS is a fine tool for such such use.

This project studied the instructional effectiveness of using animations to teach thirty-two learning objectives in an undergraduate operating systems course. The animations were created using Macromedia Flash™ and were employed as primary pedagogical tools during classroom instruction. Furthermore, a website for each animation was constructed to allow student accessibility to the animations outside the classroom. Statistical analysis using a paired t-test indicated that inclusion of animations in an undergraduate operating systems course yielded significant overall student achievement gains as measured by pretest and posttest scores. The inclusion of animations also was determined to be effective for approximately one-half of the thirty-two learning objectives when considered individually.

This paper describes a student project which is a major part of a senior level Operating Systems course at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.The project consists in conceiving and implementing an entire Operating System, where user jobs benefit from a simulated paged virtual memory on a DEC-LSI/11 based microprocessor. Students program in Portal, a modular high level language similar to Modula.The positive reactions we have obtained from our students center on satisfaction in having participated in defining specifications and having implemented an entire system themselves.

The study of Operating Systems and Systems Programming provides invaluable software engineering experience and crucial conceptual understanding that make it an essential component of an undergraduate computer science curriculum. It is also imperative that classroom course material and infrastructure keep pace with rapidly evolving technology. A "modern" course will provide an accurate software engineering experience and prevent the study of outdated concepts. With the recent increase in size and popularity of computer science courses, all course material must also be appropriately scalable. In order to create such a "modern" systems course, we redesigned UC Berkeley's CS 162, a 300 student Introduction to Operating Systems & Systems Programming course. In this paper we detail our unique curriculum layout, our advanced infrastructure support for students, and future work on extending our infrastructure for other large computer science courses

Aiming at the problems of abstract concepts, fragmented knowledge systems, and insufficient teaching adaptability in operating system courses, this paper proposes a visual teaching system based on cognitive graphs. By constructing dynamic cognitive graphs, designing multimodal visual mapping methods, and optimizing personalized teaching paths, a closed-loop teaching logic of "cognitive graph construction-visual mapping-teaching path optimization" is formed. Research shows that this system can effectively improve students' systematic cognition and application ability of operating system knowledge, providing a practical path for the teaching reform of basic computer professional courses.