research-article

On teaching how to design programs: observations from a newcomer

Author:

Norman RamseyAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 49, Issue 9

Pages 153 - 166

https://doi.org/10.1145/2692915.2628137

Published: 19 August 2014 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a personal, qualitative case study of a first course using How to Design Programs and its functional teaching languages. The paper reconceptualizes the book's six-step design process as an eight-step design process ending in a new "review and refactor" step. It recommends specific approaches to students' difficulties with function descriptions, function templates, data examples, and other parts of the design process. It connects the process to interactive "world programs." It recounts significant, informative missteps in course design and delivery. Finally, it identifies some unsolved teaching problems and some potential solutions.

References

[1]

Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman. 1985. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. McGraw-Hill, New York.

Digital Library

[2]

Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, Marie K. Norman, and Richard E. Mayer. 2010. How Learning Works: Seven Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching. Jossey-Bass higher and adult education series. Wiley.

[3]

Annette Bieniusa, Markus Degen, Phillip Heidegger, Peter Thiemann, Stefan Wehr, Martin Gasbichler, Michael Sperber, Marcus Crestani, Herbert Klaeren, and Eric Knauel. 2008. HtDP and DMdA in the battlefield: A case study in first-year programming instruction. In FDPE '08: Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Functional and Declarative Programming in Education, pagesmbox1--12, New York, NY. ACM.

Digital Library

[4]

Richard Bird and Philip Wadler. 1988. Introduction to Functional Programming. Prentice Hall, New York.

Digital Library

[5]

Stephen Bloch. 2010. Picturing Programs: An Introduction to Computer Programming. College Publications (Kings College London).

Digital Library

[6]

Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. 1975. The Mythical Man-Month. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA.

Digital Library

[7]

Hugh Burkhardt and Alan H Schoenfeld. 2003. Improving educational research: Toward a more useful, more influential, and better-funded enterprise. Educational Researcher, 32 (9): 3--14.

[8]

Koen Claessen and John Hughes. 2000 (September). QuickCheck: a lightweight tool for random testing of Haskell programs. Proceedings of the Fifth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'00), in SIGPLAN Notices, 35 (9): 268--279.

Digital Library

[9]

Marcus Crestani and Michael Sperber. 2010 (September). Experience Report: Growing programming languages for beginning students. Proceedings of the Fifteenth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'10), in SIGPLAN Notices, 45 (9): 229--234.

Digital Library

[10]

Stephen H. Edwards. 2003 (September). Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs. Journal on Educational Resources in Computing, 3 (3).

Digital Library

[11]

Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2001. How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Programming and Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, first edition.

Digital Library

[12]

Mtthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2004a. The structure and interpretation of the Computer Science curriculum. Journal of Functional Programming, 14 (4): 365--378.

Digital Library

[13]

Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2004b. The TeachScheme! project: Computing and programming for every student. Computer Science Education, 14 (1): 55--77.

[14]

Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2009 (August). A functional I/O system or, fun for freshman kids. Proceedings of the Fourteenth ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'09), in SIGPLAN Notices, 44 (9): 47--58.

Digital Library

[15]

Robert Bruce Findler, John Clements, Cormac Flanagan, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Paul Steckler, and Matthias Felleisen. 2002. DrScheme: A programming environment for Scheme. Journal of Functional Programming, 12 (2): 159--182.

Digital Library

[16]

Robert Bruce Findler and Matthias Felleisen. 2002 (September). Contracts for higher-order functions. Proceedings of the Seventh ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP'02), in SIGPLAN Notices, 37 (9): 48--59.

Digital Library

[17]

David R. Hanson. 1996. C Interfaces and Implementations. Addison Wesley.

Digital Library

[18]

John Hughes. 1989 (April). Why functional programming matters. The Computer Journal, 32 (2): 98--107.

Digital Library

[19]

Michael A. Jackson. 1975. Principles of Program Design. Academic Press, London.

Digital Library

[20]

Samuel N. Kamin. 1990. Programming Languages: An Interpreter-Based Approach. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

Digital Library

[21]

John McCarthy. 1960 (April). Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, part I. Communications of the ACM, 3 (4): 184--195.

Digital Library

[22]

Bertrand Meyer. 1997. Object-Oriented Software Construction. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, second edition.

Digital Library

[23]

Norman Ramsey. 2016. Programming Languages: Build, Prove, and Compare. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.

[24]

Emmanuel Schanzer, Kathi Fisler, and Shriram Krishnamurthi. 2013. Bootstrap: Going beyond programming in after-school computer science. In SPLASH-E (Education track of OOPSLA/SPLASH).

[25]

Michael Sperber and Marcus Crestani. 2012. Form over function - teaching beginners how to construct programs. In Scheme and Functional Programming 2012. At press time, the workshop proceedings had not yet been published, but the paper could be found at schemeworkshop.org.

Digital Library

[26]

Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. 1990. Common LISP: The Language. Digital Press, Newton, Mass., 2nd edition.

Digital Library

[27]

Danelle D. Stevens and Antonia Levi. 2005. Introduction to Rubrics: An Assessment Tool to Save Grading Time, Convey Effective Feedback, and Promote Student Learning. Stylus.

[28]

Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. 1975 (December). Scheme: An interpreter for extended lambda calculus. MIT AI Memo No. 349, reprinted in Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 11(4):405--439, Dec 1998.

Digital Library

[29]

Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson. 2011. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College. Wiley.

[30]

Grant P. Wiggins and Jay McTighe. 2005. Understanding by Design. ACSD, Alexandria, VA, second edition.

Cited By

Santos IHauswirth MNystrom NBaniassad E(2019)Experiences in bridging from functional to object-oriented programmingProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3358711.3361628(36-40)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358711.3361628
Nose JCong YMasuhara HHenz MLerner B(2022)Mio: A Block-Based Environment for Program DesignProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3563767.3568127(62-69)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563767.3568127
Sane AMody RLaxminarayan AVK JBecker BQuille KLaakso MBarendsen ESimon (2022)Lifecycle in CS1Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 110.1145/3502718.3524798(269-275)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502718.3524798
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

On teaching *how to design programs*: observations from a newcomer
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages

Recommendations

On teaching *how to design programs*: observations from a newcomer
ICFP '14: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

This paper presents a personal, qualitative case study of a first course using How to Design Programs and its functional teaching languages. The paper reconceptualizes the book's six-step design process as an eight-step design process ending in a new "...
Reflective Diary for Professional Development of Novice Teachers
SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Many starting teachers of computer science have great professional skill but often lack pedagogical training. Since providing expert mentorship directly during their lessons would be quite costly, institutions usually offer separate teacher training ...
Learning programming online: a racket-course for elementary school teachers in Finland
Koli Calling '16: Proceedings of the 16th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research

Many countries all over the world are in the process of introducing programming in their K-9 curricula. Due to recent changes in the Finnish curriculum there is a large need to train teachers in teaching programming at primary school level. In this ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 49, Issue 9

ICFP '14

September 2014

361 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2692915

Editors:
Mark W. Bailey
Hamilton College, Clinton, NY
,
Rajeev Balasubramonian
University of Utah
,
Al Davis
University of Utah
,
Sarita Adve
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champ

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '14: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
August 2014
390 pages
ISBN:9781450328739
DOI:10.1145/2628136
General Chair:
Johan Jeuring
Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands
,
Program Chair:
Manuel M.T. Chakravarty
University of New South Wales, Australia

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 August 2014

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 49, Issue 9

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

11
Total Citations
View Citations
590
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)16
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 13 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Santos IHauswirth MNystrom NBaniassad E(2019)Experiences in bridging from functional to object-oriented programmingProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3358711.3361628(36-40)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358711.3361628
Nose JCong YMasuhara HHenz MLerner B(2022)Mio: A Block-Based Environment for Program DesignProceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3563767.3568127(62-69)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3563767.3568127
Sane AMody RLaxminarayan AVK JBecker BQuille KLaakso MBarendsen ESimon (2022)Lifecycle in CS1Proceedings of the 27th ACM Conference on on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education Vol. 110.1145/3502718.3524798(269-275)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3502718.3524798
GIBBONS J(2021)How to design co-programsJournal of Functional Programming10.1017/S095679682100011331Online publication date: 2-Jul-2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796821000113
Santos IHauswirth MNystrom NBaniassad E(2019)Experiences in bridging from functional to object-oriented programmingProceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on SPLASH-E10.1145/3358711.3361628(36-40)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3358711.3361628
Castro FFisler KMontero CJoy M(2017)Designing a multi-faceted SOLO taxonomy to track program design skills through an entire courseProceedings of the 17th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3141880.3141891(10-19)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3141880.3141891
Chen SErwig M(2016)Principal type inference for GADTsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2914770.283766551:1(416-428)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2914770.2837665
Chen SErwig MBodik RMajumdar R(2016)Principal type inference for GADTsProceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2837614.2837665(416-428)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2837614.2837665
Decker ASimkins D(2016)Uncovering difficulties in learning for the intermediate programmer2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2016.7757446(1-8)Online publication date: Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2016.7757446
Decker AEgert CPhelps A(2016)Splat! er, shmup? A postmortem on a capstone production experience2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE.2016.7757399(1-9)Online publication date: Oct-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2016.7757399
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents