Data-Driven Discovery of Anchor Points for PDC Content.

The Parallel and Distributed Computing community has been interested in integrating PDC content into early CS curriculum to prime the students for more advanced materials and build a workforce able to leverage advanced computing infrastructure. To deploy this strategy at scale, it is important to identify anchor points in early CS courses where we can insert PDC content. We present an analysis of CS courses that primarily focuses on CS1 and Data Structure courses. We collected data on course content through in-person workshops, where instructors of courses classified their course materials against standard curriculum guidelines. By using these classification, we make sense of how Computer Science is being taught. We highlight different types of CS1 and Data Structure courses. And we provide reflection on how that knowledge can be used by PDC experts to identify anchoring points for PDC content, while being sensitive to the needs of instructors.