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Teaching how to program using automated assessment and functional glossy games (experience report)

https://doi.org/10.1145/3236777 · Full text

Journal: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 2018, № ICFP, p. 1-17

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Authors: José Bacelar Almeida, Alcino Cunha, Nuno Macedo, Hugo Pacheco, José Proença

Funder Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Abstract

Our department has long been an advocate of the functional-first school of programming and has been teaching Haskell as a first language in introductory programming course units for 20 years. Although the functional style is largely beneficial, it needs to be taught in an enthusiastic and captivating way to fight the unusually high computer science drop-out rates and appeal to a heterogeneous population of students. This paper reports our experience of restructuring, over the last 5 years, an introductory laboratory course unit that trains hands-on functional programming concepts and good software development practices. We have been using game programming to keep students motivated, and following a methodology that hinges on test-driven development and continuous bidirectional feedback . We summarise successes and missteps, and how we have learned from our experience to arrive at a model for comprehensive and interactive functional game programming assignments and a general functionally-powered automated assessment platform , that together provide a more engaging learning experience for students. In our experience, we have been able to teach increasingly more advanced functional programming concepts while improving student engagement.

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About this publication
Publication type Журнальна стаття
Number of citations 5
Number of works in the list of references 12
Journal indexed in Scopus Yes
Journal indexed in Web of Science Yes
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