Schedule
Project timeline
Twenty-four months, August 2026 through July 2028. Year 1 focuses on development; Year 2 on refinement, classroom testing, and evaluation.
Curriculum materials
Development starts in month 1 and runs throughout. Year 1 produces modules on concurrency foundations, fault tolerance, security, and the automotive and aviation applications. Year 2 refines them against early feedback while classroom testing in engineering courses runs in parallel, so iteration and validation happen together.
Visualization and wrappers
Core implementation runs through the end of Year 1: new visualizations plus language-specific wrappers for ROS 2, FreeRTOS, and Linux. Year 2 covers maintenance, features requested by users, and testing in real classrooms for usability, correctness of the visualizations, and whether they actually help students find bugs.
CEDL
Development starts in month 9, once the foundational tooling has matured, and continues through month 18. Months 19–24 shift to evaluation: pattern-detection analyses, deployment in pilot classes, empirical data on effectiveness, and refinement from classroom experience.
Evaluation
Pre- and post-surveys
Surveys administered before and after each course examine student perceptions of concurrency concepts and confidence with the material. Most items are quantitative, with a few open-ended prompts for insight that numbers miss. Analysis compares pre- and post-responses.
Tool evaluation
Users are surveyed on the effectiveness of the libraries and CEDL. For the visualizer, a user-testing protocol guides formal sessions with three to six students and faculty, optionally recording audio and screen. Sessions are analyzed for task success and failure, time on task segments, emotional responses, behavior flow, obstacles, participant perspectives, and bugs encountered.