Teaching Java Concurrency to CS vs IT Students: A Matter of Emphasis

— A number of colleges and universities have recently added new degree programs in Information Technology (IT), or added IT components to existing Computer Science (CS) programs. Java language and technology are almost inescapable elements of both CS and IT programs. One of Java's more advanced features, languagelevel support for concurrency in the form of explicit multithreading, is important to both CS and IT students, but for different reasons. Teaching Java concurrency to CS and IT students, therefore, presents different challenges and requires emphasizing the topic in different ways. We discuss these issues, and present our experiences from CS and IT classes taught recently, in which Java concurrency was a topic.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: PDPTA
• Authors: Charles E. Hughes, Marc L. Smith
• Keywords: Explicit Multithreading, Java Concurrency, Java Language, PDPTA 2003, PDPTA 2007