Having the opportunity to teach again at the University of Arizona was a real treat. Getting to put my new AWS cloud knowledge to use was especially fun. The CSC 346 Cloud Computing course teaches general cloud principles such as automation, scalability, and on-demand pricing as well as specific AWS technologies such as EC2, Lambda and S3.

Most of the course involved assignment projects where students learned and demonstrated skills with Docker, JavaScript, HTTP communications, Linux environments, automation templates as well as many specific AWS servcies. Both fall 2022 and spring 2024 classes had 100 students in them, and involved using AWS Academy services to provide each student with their own account environment.

I also developed a web based testing application students could use throughout the course to test their work and cloud deployments. Because of the cloud nature of the assignments, it was not practical to simply have students turn in a set of code or template files. It was necessary to test their work in place. The testing application used the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) framework to host a basic python Flask application. The Flask application incorporated the Playwright testing framework to directly test student assignments in their AWS accounts. This both simplified my teaching team's assessment of the work as well as provided immediate feedback to the students while working on their assignments.

If you want to see the course website from the spring 2024 course, you can see a timecapsule of the site here.