Robert (Corky) Cartwright/Vivek Sarkar, Rice University (X10 team contact: Michael Hind)
Dr. Cartwright and Dr. Sarkar of Rice University will create curricular material for a "first programming course" using X10, based on their experience co-teaching COMP 211 (Principles of Program Design, https://wiki.rice.edu/confluence/display/cswiki/211) at Rice in Spring 2010. COMP 211 was the first course on software design and programming methodology offered to freshmen in their second semester. These concepts were taught using a combination of Scheme and Java. The idea behind this proposal is to create a modified version of the COMP 211 lecture material by replacing Scheme and Java by X10, and introducing implicit and explicit parallelism wherever there is a natural fit. COMP 211 is taught with the assumption that an IDE is available to the students (specifically, DrScheme for Scheme and DrJava for Java), so it will also be natural to incorporate the use of X10DT in this material.