Integrating Parallelism into the First Theory Course
John Savage, Brown University
The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of many concrete models
of computation and methods of analysis that are more closely
related to the educational experience of the computer science
undergraduate student than those found in the language-based
approach of the traditional first theory course. We propose a new
first theory course based on this material that treats a variety of
computational models including the circuit, the VLSI machine and
the PRAM, models of structured and unstructured parallelism. We
give a brief overview of this approach.