Introducing CS-major Students to parallel programming using StarLogo

One of the most common difficulties an instructor faces during an introductory course in computer programming, is the lack of appropriate pedagogically efficient "tools" that will help his/her students understand fundamental notions of programming. Especially, complicated notions are, most of the times, only partially taught or left uncovered for a more advanced course. However, the use of modern technology and computers in education, programming included, is not confined only in computer science courses, but finds applications also in sciences like Math, Biology and Sociology. As a result, there has been also a demand for simpler and friendlier software environments that will provide the vehicle of knowledge dissemination for these sciences and, more generally, for education. Starlogo - introduced by Mitchell Resnick at MIT Media Laboratory - is an programming environment that simulates decentralized systems and provides an intuitive interface that can be used even by elementary school students to explore systems and worlds in which thousands of objects participate and interact with each other. Of course this same environment can be used for an introduction to programming and especially to massively parallel programming. In this paper we initially present a number of different approaches that have been used so far by instructors to improve the didactic experience of their students with the power of the Starlogo environment. Using the Starlogo environment, we also organized a series of experimental Starlogo courses. In this paper we present the way these courses were organized and some preliminary results of our experimental approach.