The significant expense of modern college textbooks limits availability to those who can afford them. As computational thinking and programming increasingly become desired skills, the computing community needs low-cost curricular materials to make computing courses available to all students. Online curricular materials are readily available for introductory programming courses. However, such resources for later computing courses are comparatively rare. To address this need, we developed Dive into Systems, a free, online textbook for teaching introductory computer systems topics. We are in the second year of a multi-year NSF grant to augment Dive into Systems with dynamic visualizations, interactive exercises, and worked examples. Our project has been community-focused throughout, and an important component of our grant is getting the community involved in helping to design interactive exercises for students and supplemental resources for instructors.

Following the success of last year’s Affiliated Event where we received invaluable community input on year 2 topics (Binary Representation and the Memory Hierarchy) and recruited exercise developers, this year’s event will focus on: sharing our current progress on interactive tool development with the Computer Science Education community; discussing issues that students face in learning introductory systems topics; brainstorming interactive materials that could help instructors address those needs; and recruit exercise developers for future years of our project. The Dive into Systems project has the potential to help the field of computing become more equitable by developing a high-quality, free, online textbook that can be used by college students anywhere. Learn more at https://diveintosystems.org.