EXPERIENCE ON INTRODUCING PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED ARCHITECTURE RESEARCH CONCEPTS IN COMPUTER ENGINEERING GRADE STUDENTS

One of the key challenges of university teaching in any branch of Computer Engineering is to encourage students to acquire the ability of self-learning. As we know, Computer Engineering is a discipline which is continuously changing, therefore, in a very short period of time after graduation, the student will probably have to work with new technologies and concepts which did not learn before. This is why they need to “learn how to learn” by themselves and how to solve new issues. This has always been a challenge in this discipline, however due to the dramatic speed computer science and technology changes nowadays, it is even more relevant now. Besides, nowadays many computer science problems can be solved diving and querying in the Internet, but they need to know how to do it properly. To tackle this challenge two subjects of Computer Architecture Degree —Parallel and Distributed Architecture and Parallel and Distributed Programming —were coordinated to deliver interrelated tasks on related research topics with the professor supervision and support. This way the benefits were twofold: on the one hand the students learned about emerging technologies and on the other the students learned how to learn by themselves. The results were quite positive: students were highly motivated due to the fact of learning emerging technologies, they could verify how they could learn and solve new issues by themselves and they learned rising technologies.