Approach for teaching concurrency in Python

The focus of this thesis is to design a learning concept for teaching concurrent operations in Python. The standard Python library includes three modules that allow programming concurrent operations - threading, multiprocessing and asyncio. There is no course focused on teaching concurrent operations and parallelism in Python taught at Czech public universities providing education in information technology, and only one course mentions all three modules of the standard library. The main objective of this paper is to propose a teaching approach consisting of a syllabus and illustrative examples to facilitate the process of implementing the teaching of concurrent operations issues in Python. The concept is mainly targeted at the University of Economics in Prague, but during the validation phase no data was obtained showing reduced effectiveness of the concept on students of other universities. Using a literature review, the capabilities of Python regarding concurrent operations and parallelism were analyzed. A systematic mapping study method was used to analyze the current state of teaching the issues of this thesis using published course syllabi. On the basis of these two analyses, a starting point for the development of the teaching design was defined. A curriculum including a multi-threaded approach, multiprocessing and asynchronous programming was proposed. Emphasis is placed on understanding the basic principles of concurrent operations, parallelism and the differences in Python caused by Global Interpreter Lock. A total of 22 illustrative examples have been designed to support this curriculum. These examples, where possible, make use of the Karel robot library, which is currently used for illustrative examples in the Programming in Python course at the University of Economics in Prague. The library provides a graphical interface to see how individual robots behave and move. The concept was subsequently tested on 8 students in the form of pre-assessment and post-assessment questionnaires in the form of a test of knowledge of the subject. A lecture according to the proposed curriculum using illustrative examples was conducted between these questionnaires. Each test question was scored with a maximum of one point. The average improvement of the respondents was 0.5 points per question. Finally, possible modifications to both the curriculum and the illustrative examples that may lead to the transfer of more knowledge to the students were discussed.