TgFuseFs: How High School Students Can Write a Filesystem Prototype

Italian high school students who are majoring in Computer Science usually study subjects like programming, databases, networks, system engineering, electronics and operating systems. While most of these subjects let the students practice with projects, operating systems usually is taught in a more theoretical way because practical projects either are too simple to be didactically useful or require too many prerequisites. Hence, components like filesystems are only studied in theory from an high level point of view. We think that building a filesystem prototype could be considered active learning and could improve the operating systems learning experience. For this reason in this work we will show how fifth year students with very few prerequisites can build their first working prototype of a remote filesystem in userspace using Python, FUSE and Telegram. Since the activity is designed for high school students, the prototype won’t be perfect but we will present some of the issues that students should be aware of and more advanced students should address.