The Study of the Classic Producer-consumer Problem in a Series of IT Courses

It is a time-consuming task for the instructors to design the examples, assignments, and projects to meet the requirement of learning outcomes. Luckily, most of the courses in information technology major are relevant and some are closely related to each other. Therefore, we propose to take advantage of the same problem which can be analyzed from different aspects under a series of IT courses. It will not only reduce the burden of the instructors to design the brand-new exercises but also help students quickly understand the foundation of the problem from what they studied and embark on exploring the high-level topics in new courses.

In this paper, we use the classic producer-consumer problem as an example to present our proposition. This problem is generally shown up in operating systems course to illustrate the multi-process synchronization. We expand this problem from different angels and motivate the students to further explore other relevant topics: The objects? datatypes, properties, functions are declared in programming course and the built-in thread feature in some specific language like Java can also be demonstrated by this problem's solution. The design of data structure of the producer, the consumer, and the buffer can be discussed in data structure course. The collaboration between the producer and the consumer can be used for explaining the cause of deadlock in database course. Finally, the producer-consumer problem is used to clarify different application architectures in application/software design course. We expect that our methodology on IT education can illumine other educators looking to the similar mode in their program.