Steve Robbins
and
Kay A. Robbins
Division of Computer Science
The University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, Texas 78249
This page is at http://vip.cs.utsa.edu/nsf/pubs/process.html
Empirical Exploration In Undergraduate Operating Systems
Abstract:
The undergraduate operating systems course can provide students
with a valuable introduction to empirical testing and experimentation.
We have developed a process scheduling simulator designed to develop
student empirical skills while they are learning part of the standard
operating systems curriculum. The simulator is written in Java and
available for direct experimentation via the World Wide Web.
By accessing the remote URL through an appletviewer, students can
permanently save input test data and simulator results generated
in HTML format. In one type of assignment, students are given a
hypothesis about process scheduling and are asked to develop experiments
to support or disprove the hypothesis. In a second type of assignment
students are asked to develop their own hypotheses. Not only did these
assignments enhance student understanding of process scheduling, but the
techniques exposed students to empirical approaches to validation and testing.
The full paper is available in
Postscript (3MB)
PDF (70KB)
HTML
This work has been supported
by the National Science Foundation.