A Physical Platform for Teaching Distributed Systems in a Simplified Setting

Abstract: The digitalization of our society is moving quickly, and we all want to keep up with it. This puts a lot of pressure on schools to teach programming and computational thinking in the education. For this reason The Swedish agency of education (Skolverket) is adding com- putational thinking to the Swedish primary school curriculum.As a response to Skolverket’s new curriculum, we developed a plat- form to teach the basics of distributed and bare-metal programming to students.With inspiration from Zachtronics Industries’ games Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100, the platform consists of a motherboard, programmable nodes, and peripheral nodes. The nodes are programmed using an easy-to-use web-based UI, intended to be served from a server running in the classroom.