The Concept of Nondeterminism: Its Development and Implications for Teaching |
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| Authors: | Michal Armoni Mordechai Ben-Ari |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel |
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| Abstract: | Nondeterminism is a fundamental concept in computer science that appears in various contexts such as automata theory, algorithms
and concurrent computation. We present a taxonomy of the different ways that nondeterminism can be defined and used; the categories
of the taxonomy are domain, nature, implementation, consistency, execution and semantics. An historical survey shows how the
concept was developed from its inception by Rabin & Scott, Floyd and Dijkstra, as well as the interplay between nondeterminism
and concurrency. Computer science textbooks and pedagogical software are surveyed to determine how they present the concept;
the results show that the treatment of nondeterminism is generally fragmentary and unsystematic. We conclude that the teaching
of nondeterminism must be integrated through the computer science curriculum so that students learn to see nondeterminism
both in terms of abstract mathematical entities and in terms of machines whose execution is unpredictable.
Michal Armoni
is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Science Teaching of the Weizmann Institute of Science. She received her PhD
in science teaching from the Tel Aviv University, and her BA and MSc in computer science from the Technion. Her research interests
are in the teaching and learning processes in computer science, in particular of fundamental concepts such as reduction and
nondeterminism. She is currently on leave from the computer science department of the Open University of Israel. She has extensive
experience in developing learning materials in computer science and in teaching the subjects at all levels from high school
through graduate students.
Mordechai Ben-Ari
is an associate professor in the Department of Science Teaching of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He holds a PhD in mathematics
and computer science from the Tel Aviv University. In 2004, he received the ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions
to Computer Science Education. He is the author of numerous computer science textbooks and of Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (Prometheus 2005). His research interests include the use of visualization in teaching computer science, the pedagogy of
concurrent and distributed computation, the application of theories of education to computer science education and the nature
of science. |
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