By Jennifer Teal Levine
SIGCSE 11 seemed like a good place to challenge some of the assumptions that we make all year round. Assumptions, and dare I say, excuses, for why the integration of parallelism into undergraduate classrooms seems to be progressing so slowly. When we develop and decide what programs to fund, Intel wants to know what sort of impact we’re making to the ecosystem and we naturally are looking for the pain points.

The Educational Exchange was introduced to provide ready-to-use materials to shorten professors course development cycle; Classroom tools grants provide the software products to introduce students to these difficult concepts; and most recently the Intel® Manycore Testing Lab provides hands-on access to a next-generation development environment. All this is great and the profs that use it, love it. But why aren’t all of our members using these free resources? Is access to the hardware, courseware, and tools, not the core issue we’re dealing with when it comes to changing the way we educate the next generation of technologists? If it’s not access, are there other key points we should be addressing in the Intel Academic Community?

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