FBL:An Activity to Improve Students' Conceptual Understanding of the Course Operating System
Sujit N. Deshpande, Sunita Milind Dol · Journal of Engineering Education/Journal of engineering education transformations/Journal of engineering education transformation · 2017
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is computer software which is freely licensed software to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way. FOSS can also be used for teaching the course. We have designed an activity FOSS Based Learning (FBL). In FBL, instructor uses the free open source software to teach the topic and problem solving based on that topic. In this work, CPU-OS Simulator as FOSS is used. This tool can be used for conceptual understanding of various topics of Operating System, Compiler Construction, System Programming and Computer Architecture. In this particular study, FBL is used for studying and evaluating the performance of scheduling algorithms in Operating System course for Computer Science and Engineering students. The results of teaching this topic using FBLis presented in this paper. For this study, one group pre-post test method is considered with three learning objectives (LOs) (1) To draw Gantt chart for four scheduling algorithms(LO1) (2) To calculate waiting time for individual process and average waiting time, for four scheduling algorithms (LO2) and (3) To calculate average turnaround time for four scheduling algorithms (LO3). Also the students' feedback about this FBL is also given in this paper.