Leading team:
- Prof. Michal Armoni
Project team:
- Ruthie Surujon
Brief
Concurrency is a foundational concept in computer science, yet the term often refers to several different aspects of system execution. This project proposes a set of structural distinctions that clarify the concept and provide a lens for analyzing how learners understand concurrent systems, particularly in situations where several aspects of execution must be considered simultaneously.
This lens helps reinterpret research on students’ understanding of concurrency, explains the notorious difficulty learners encounter when moving from sequential reasoning to systems with multiple active components, and distinguishes reasoning about concurrent execution from coordination strategies used to control program behavior. It also supports evaluation of programming environments according to the concurrent behaviors they make visible.
The project examines 7th-grade students’ reasoning about concurrent execution in Scratch programs, alongside an analysis of the Scratch execution model and what it makes visible.
This is the master research of Ruthie Surujon.