Students’ understandings of concurrent programming

This paper describes a qualitative, explorative study of how students understand some concepts in concurrent programming. The study is based on interviews with students regarding the final programming assignment in a concurrent programming course. We use phenomenography to analyse the students’ statements about tuple spaces, the concurrent data structures on which the assignments are based, and to find the different ways in which they understand writing and debugging a concurrent program. We then discuss the effects of these understandings on how students construct concurrent programs, how teaching can be improved to form more useful understandings and how software tools can be designed to support the development of concurrent programs.