Experience report: Addition of PDC content to existing CS0 courses at a small community college

Parallel and distributed computing (PDC) is increasingly recognized as important undergraduate computer science content that should be included earlier, at the introductory level courses, instead of being reserved for upper level elective courses. A barrier to this objective is that the most commonly used materials for CS0, CS1, and CS2 do not include PDC topics. This experience report describes the experience of including two PDC activities in an existing CS0 course that otherwise used mainstream course materials. Building on prior work that suggests that unplugged activities may be one way to successfully engage students, one of the activities was an in class group activity coin search. The other activity was a more in-depth programming assignment. The preliminary results suggest that the unplugged activity engaged students and was a good introduction to the topic in a short amount of time (less than one class period). The programming assignment was enthusiastically received by some students, but many students chose not to participate in the assignment.