Gaining Educational Users for GENI Justin Cappos NYU Poly Computer Science and Engineering

Educational use with Seattle Classroom experience Released in Spring 2009 Used in more than two dozen classes (so far) 3 tutorials, 3 library references, etc. 10 battle tested assignments Overlay routing, flow control, NAT / Non-transitive connectivity, Chord (DHT), web / chat servers, reference monitors, NAT tunneling, etc. OS classes are coming Advanced projects MapReduce, Distributed Web Servers, etc. Community support Supported by educational groups SIGCSE paper, 3 CCSC workshops, etc. Top ranked SIGCOMM Educational Resource Coming in Computer Networking by Kurose & Ross Most popular networking book!

Four pieces of advice Address educational needs Minimize adoption hurdles Don't overestimate your audience Promote your work widely

Address educational needs Focus on learning objectives Enhancing student understanding of flow control Not: Enhancing student understanding of the GENI control framework Why would this be useful?

Minimize Adoption Hurdles Minimize initial setup costs Should be able to easily demo in 5 mins Make reusable modules Minimize management overhead Instructors must have very low per-student and per-class overhead No “ask first” Minimize student pain Students should spend time learning concepts, not GENI tools!

Don't Overestimate Your Audience Students have different levels of competency Think about error messages! Code after you know how it should look Should have extensive tutorials Wiki is worth the effort Instructors are very busy Many teach 3 classes per semester and networks only every other year Make it 'Chauffeur' simple

Promote Your Work Widely Give talks at a variety of venues 4-year / 2-year instructors may only go to 1-2 events a year Only a few will come to GECs Regional conferences exist Promote individually Easy 5 min demo is key You could walk them through it!

Seattle based Educational experiences Summary Seattle based Educational experiences Address educational needs Minimize adoption hurdles Don't overestimate your audience Promote your work widely Seattle: Battle tested educational platform! Free, simple and safe to use Open participation / open source Broad community Easy to drop into a class https://seattle.cs.washington.edu/