Functional and Declarative Programming in Education (FDPE08)

To be held in conjunction with ICFP 2008
on Sunday, September 21, 2008
in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.

Important Dates

Goals of the Workshop

Functional and declarative programming plays an increasingly important role in computing education at all levels. The aim of this workshop is to bring together educators and others who are interested in exchanging ideas on how to use a functional or declarative programming style in the classroom or in e-learning environments. Beyond the traditional focus of teaching programming by means of the functional or declarative paradigm, we are especially interested in case studies showing how these languages can be elegantly applied in teaching other topics of computer science (such as Appel's use of ML to teach compiler construction).

Another interesting area covered by the workshop should be dedicated to teaching functional or declarative programming ideas in industrial environments. Functional and declarative languages have become more influential in industry. Thus, teaching such languages has become an interesting topic, as it must take into consideration long programming experiences in imperative languages.

Topics:

• programming courses using traditional functional and declarative programming languages (e.g. Haskell, Mathematica, ML, Prolog, Scheme, etc);
• programming courses teaching functional programming in commercial languages (e.g. C, C++, Common LISP, etc);
• programming courses teaching functional program design in modern OO languages (e.g. Java, C#, Eiffel, etc);
• pedagogic programming environments to support functional and declarative programming;
• teaching tools implemented with functional and declarative languages and/or ideas;
• declarative programming language extensions and implementations with pedagogical relevance;
• application courses that benefit heavily from functional and declarative programming (e.g. theorem proving or hardware design).

• secondary school;
• college and university;
• post-college and continuing professional education.

FDPE will be held in conjunction with the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2008) in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada on Sunday, September 21, 2008.

Preliminary Program

Session 1 (Chair: Adam Parkin)

• 10:30 - 11:00 HtDP and DMdA in the Battlefield - A case study in first-year programming instruction
  Annette Bieniusa, Markus Degen, Phillip Heidegger, Peter Thiemann, Stefan Wehr (Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg), Martin Gasbichler (Zühlke Engineering AG),Marcus Crestani, Eric Knauel (Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen), Michael Sperber (DeinProgramm)
• 11:00 - 11:30 The chilling descent: making the transition to a conventional curriculum
  Prabhakar Ragde (University of Waterloo)
• 11:30 - 12:00 Functional Programming and Theorem Proving for Undergraduates: A Progress Report
  Carl Eastlund, Matthias Felleisen (Northeastern University College of Computer Science), Rex Page (University of Oklahoma)

12.00 - 13.30 Lunch break

Session 2 (Chair: Michael Hanus)

• 13:30 - 14:00 SASyLF: An Educational Proof Assistant for Language Theory
  Jonathan Aldrich, Robert J. Simmons (Carnegie Mellon University), Key Shin (Microsoft Corporation)
• 14:00 - 14:30 Experimenting with Formal Languages Using Forlan
  Alley Stoughton (Kansas State University)
• 14:30 - 15:00 A Robot in Every Classroom: Robots and Functional Programming Across the Curriculum
  David Wakeling (University of Gloucestershire Business School)

15.00 - 15.30 Coffe Break

Session 3 (Chair: Matthew Flatt)

• 15:30 - 16:00 Teaching Functional Programming with Soccer-Fun
  Peter Achten (Radboud University Nijmegen)
• 16:00 - 16:30 Declarative language extensions for Prolog courses
  Ulrich Neumerkel, Markus Triska (Technical University Wien), Jan Wielemaker (University of Amsterdam)
• 16:30 - 17:00 Tips for Teaching Types and Functions
  Fritz Ruehr (Willamette University)
• 17:00 - Final Discussion

Submission

Submitted papers should describe new ideas, experimental results, or education-related projects. In order to encourage lively discussion, submitted papers may describe new ideas of education as well as project proposals about incorporating functional and declarative concepts into education curricula. All papers will be judged on a combination of correctness, significance, novelty, clarity, and interest to the community.

All paper submissions must be at most 12 pages total length in the standard ACM SIGPLAN two-column conference format (9pt). Accepted papers will be published by the ACM and will appear in the ACM Digital Library. Submissions will be refereed by the program commitee who will call upon other members involved in teaching in related areas for expert advice.

Beside regular papers extended abstracts presenting new ideas in teaching declarative programming and (short) tool describtions are welcome as well.

The submission page is now open. In case of problems contact Frank Huch.

Registration, hotels, travel, etc.

Program Committee

• John Clements, California Polytechnic State University, United States
• Matthew Flatt, University of Utah, United States
• Michael Hanus, University of Kiel, Germany
• Frank Huch, University of Kiel, Germany (co-chair)
• Adam Parkin, University of Victoria, Canada (co-chair)
• Simon Thompson, University of Kent, UK
• Mads Torgersen, Microsoft Redmond, United States