Thank you Chris for putting together this list, and all your efforts in the education space in general! My name is Michael Snoyman. I use Haskell and functional programming professionally, and do quite a bit of training at the professional level, but have almost no experience at the beginner level. I'm basically a self-taught programmer from grade school, where I was given a QuickBasic book and had ample access to DOS based machines. My interest here is that I'm basically the "get off my lawn" old guy, who's watched my younger siblings grow up in a different world, one where GUI interfaces dominate, and there's no incentive to _really_ learn how a computer works. I want to make sure my kids have the same opportunity to learn programming that I had. And in that process, I'll likely end up needing to teach some of their friends too to help with peer pressure. I'm not insistent that my kids learn Haskell or functional programming, but my working hypothesis is that these will be the easiest things for them to learn, and the easiest for me to teach.
> What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously?
For the beginner level, I've been blogging about my experiences in my "kids coding" blog post series. Since the start of the school year we've been too busy unfortunately to continue much with it.
I have lots of other tutorials and other write-ups at a non-beginner level, mostly in Haskell, but with some Rust added in recently. I've sadistically considered switching to Rust as a beginner language :)
> What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation?
I think Scratch is wonderful, in that it can easily be added to a classroom curiculum by teachers who don't know much about computers. My eldest (10 years old) has gone through this at school. However, I don't think he's really getting a great deal out of it, and he says as much. I'd love to see something easily approachable but with more of a runway. I'm thinking back to how I had Basic available on all computers around me by default for the first 10 years of my life.
I realize that Code World may be exactly this :)
> Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space?
I'd love to see others share their experiences with teaching young children, and _especially_ how to keep them motivated. I find that with so many easy distractions available on modern computers and devices, it's hard for programming to compete for attention.
> What vision do you have for functional programming in education? That is, what general principles guide your thinking?
My kids understand math. They're already learning it in school. Teaching them functions took all of 5 minutes. I don't want to corrupt them with not-functions as found in imperative languages, I believe it will confuse them. That's my guiding principle here.