Title: PROCEEDINGS OF THE ACM ON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES Search for Conference Proceedings Publications

Initial page: 82:1

23rd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP)

St Louis, MO, SEP 23-29, 2018

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 6 Citations

CORDIS: Physical sciences > Computer science

FOS: Natural sciences > Computer and information sciences

Authenticus ID: P-00P-S0Q

DOI: 10.1145/3236777

Abstract (EN): 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.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 17