Creating interest in operating systems via active learning

It is generally accepted that multi-threading, concurrency and semaphores (including producer-consumer, readers-writers problems, etc.) are a major challenge to undergraduate operating systems students. In addition, while the author became fascinated while working with systems programming in industry, students did not appear to be interested in the theoretical, passive-learning approach of an all-lecture course. The challenge was to add an active-learning component that would help students to better understand concepts and enhance their interest, while still retaining all course content and cutting the lecture time. The OS course was modified to include about one hour of active learning for two hours of lecture. Our active learning approach uses exercises and mini-labs on a Linux system, and successfully raised interest for the students