kappelmann/engaging-large-scale-functional-programming

Engaging, Large-Scale Functional Programming Education in Physical and Virtual Space

This repository contains the resources of the paper "Engaging, Large-Scale Functional Programming Education in Physical and Virtual Space" published at "Trends in Functional Programming in Education 2021/2022" (TFPIE 2021/2022).

The paper reports about teaching experiences, engagement mechanisms, and (automation) tools to successfully run a functional programming course with more than 1000 students in physical and virtual space. You can find the paper here.

As part of the paper, we also share a selected set of exercises and tools. You can find them here. Said exercises were created for the winter semester 2019 and winter semester 2020 iterations of the Functional Programming and Verification course at the Technical University of Munich. You can find further, though probably less exciting, exercises of these iterations here and here.

Please contact one of the authors if you are interested in any exercises not published here, want to have our LaTeX sources, or if you have any other question.

Abstract

Worldwide, computer science departments have experienced a dramatic increase in the number of student enrolments. Moreover, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic requires institutions to radically replace the traditional way of on-site teaching, moving interaction from physical to virtual space. We report on our strategies and experience tackling these issues as part of a Haskell-based functional programming and verification course, accommodating over 2000 students in the course of two semesters. Among other things, we fostered engagement with weekly programming competitions and creative homework projects, workshops with industry partners, and collaborative pair-programming tutorials. To offer such an extensive programme to hundreds of students, we automated feedback for programming as well as inductive proof exercises. We explain and share our tools and exercises so that they can be reused by other educators.

Authors

• Kevin Kappelmann
• Jonas Rädle
• Lukas Stevens

Acknowledgements

We want to thank all people involved in the course, in particular Tobias Nipkow, Manuel Eberl, our student assistants, the ArTEMiS development team, our industry partners Active Group, QAware, TNG Technology Consulting, and Well-Typed, and last but not least our 2000 Haskell students.