FlowerJoinAnalogy

TCPP_Programming CS1 CS2 DSA Systems ProgLang accessible

Originally described by Steve Bogaerts (Bogaerts2014).

No link to independent description publicly available. See “Details” section for more details:

Details

Bogaerts used this analogy to explain the notion of thread join operation. Suppose a parent and their child are out for a walk along a trail in their local park. The child decides to travel off the path to pick flowers. While the parent can go on for some time without the child, eventually they will call out to the child to catch up: “Come now, please join me up here”. The parent will then wait for their child to join up with them, and then the two continue walking up the path together.

This is analogous to a main thread calling the join() operation on a child thread. Thread A blocks until B is finished; only then can A continue with their work.

CS2013 Knowledge Unit Coverage

N/A

TCPP Topics Coverage

Programming Topics

Accessibility

Generally accessible.

Assessment

(Bogaerts2014) used flower analogy to explain the thread join operation as part of a larger unit in parallelism in a CS1 course. He mentions that the total amount of time spent on parallelism was larger in the section that used analogies and hands-on activities compared to the one that presented the topics in a traditional lecture-style format (4 hours vs 90 minutes). However, the section that used analogies and hands-on activities performed better than those who received the information in a traditional lecture-format. Bogaerts argues that it is much better to spend more time on fewer parallel concepts in a hands-on way in an introductory course, rather than covering a variety of parallel concepts in a non-hands-on way. The final conclusion drawn is that analogies and hands-on activities enabled students to learn better and stimulated greater interest in the subject than a course that delivered the material in a typical lecture-style fashion. (Bogaerts2017) extends the assessment of the original paper, but found that while student interest increased, the desire to learn more decreased. The authors theorize that this is because most of the students in the course were non-majors who will not be pursuing computing in the future.

Citations