Tag Archives: pedagogy

Types versus sets in math and programming languages

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Brent

For several years I have been designing and implementing a functional teaching language especially for use in the context of a Discrete Mathematics course. The idea is for students to be exposed to some functional and statically-typed programming early in … Continue reading →

Posted in projects, teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | 10 Comments

POGIL workshop

Posted on August 7, 2016 by Brent

A few weeks ago I attended a 3-day training workshop in St. Louis, put on by the POGIL project. I attended a short POGIL session at the SIGCSE CS education conference in March and was sufficiently impressed to sign up for … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Experience report: oral final exam

Posted on October 2, 2015 by Brent

This past spring I taught a standard data structures course (stacks, queues, binary trees, heaps, asymptotic analysis, that kind of thing). Inspired by a group I participated in exploring pedagogy and course design—led by the wonderful Betsy Burris—I decided to … Continue reading →

Posted in teaching | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Teaching abstraction

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Brent

I’m just beginning to prepare for the third incarnation of CIS 194, Introduction to Haskell in the spring. It’s occasioned some general thoughts on teaching abstraction which seemed worth writing down. Abstractions, of course, are everywhere in CS. By abstraction … Continue reading →

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Monads: Easy or Hard?

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Brent

Executive summary: they are actually both (or neither). It is easy to learn their definition but hard to grasp the consequences. Or we might say they are easy to know and hard to understand (grok). It is vitally important for … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, learning, teaching | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Abstraction, intuition, and the “monad tutorial fallacy”

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Brent

While working on an article for the Monad.Reader, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how people learn and gain intuition for abstraction, and the implications for pedagogy. The heart of the matter is that people begin with the concrete, … Continue reading →

Posted in haskell, learning, math, teaching | Tagged , , , , , | 131 Comments