application of social game context to teaching mutual exclusion

Mutual exclusion mechanisms, like semaphore and monitor, are fundamental tools used by software engineers to solve the race condition problem, ensure barrier, and achieve other workflow patterns. Introductory teachings on how parallel and concurrent processes compete over shared resources have the underlying working principles of the operating system and computer architecture as a starting point for learning the mutual exclusion concepts. Conventional teaching method focuses on lectures and solving race condition problem with counting semaphore in C programming language. Before applying conventional teaching method, we advocate the introduction of a social game scenario in teaching basic concepts of workers concurrently competing over a shared resource. We also introduce a simplified mutual exclusion assignment in which the implementation complexity is reduced by application of a specially designed graphical mechanism for mutual exclusion. Compared to a conventional method, the proposed experimental teaching method has a 15% higher success rate in solving race condition problem in C programming language. Regardless of additional steps introduced to make students familiar with the concepts of mutual exclusion, the experimental method is slightly advantageous when median time-on-task results are compared.