Author(s):
The significant expense of modern college textbooks limits availability to those who can afford them. As computational thinking and programming increasingly become desired skills, the computing community needs low-cost curricular materials to make computing courses available to all students. While online curricular materials are readily available for introductory programming courses, such resources for later computing courses are comparatively rare. To address this need, we developed Dive into Systems (diveintosystems.org), a free, online textbook that introduces computer systems, computer organization, and parallel computing. Our book’s topic coverage is designed to give readers a gentle and broad introduction to these important topics and assumes only a CS1 background of the reader.This lightning talk presents our experiences, motivations, and goals for further developing Dive into Systems to include dynamic visualizations, interactive exercises, and worked examples. We are at the beginning of the third year of our multi-year NSF grant, and will share our current progress on interactive tool and exercise development. Our project has been community-focused throughout, and an important component of our grant is getting the community involved in helping to design interactive exercises for students and supplemental resources for instructors.
