Here's a loosely collected bundle of thoughts in response to a small part of this. I'm curious about FP at various levels of education. I know Haskell is or has been used for various university courses. Is there any sort of existing network of professors that share Haskell (or Racket, etc) teaching resources and materials? Are there resources that make sense to share between K-12 teachers and higher ed teachers? (e.g. how well does How To Design Programs work for teaching kids?) A related topic on my mind is BayHac and similar events. We discussed the possibility of having some younger people attend, but ended up not following through on that and attendance was mostly (entirely?) adults, as usual. I'm wondering if there is value in trying to make some part of BayHac more accessable and appealing to a wider audience (incl young people and people new to programming), or whether this would dilute the focus of the event too much and end up serving both young and old audiences poorly. I bring up BayHac to this list because I see it not just as a "let's get together and hack" event, but more like a "let's get together and share knowledge" event, where the knowledge share ideally enables people to get hacking on something. And pointing people to educational resources like codeworld is exactly the sort of thing that should be going on at BayHac, so that those with the desire to learn are empowered to continue doing so for long after the event is over. On Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 14:20 Chris Smith

Hello, everyone! Welcome to education@haskell.org.

This mailing list grew out of discussions at ICFP 2018 about creating a space for collaboration and discussion of using Haskell and other functional programming languages in general education. To jump-start that process, I'd like to invite everyone to introduce themselves and specifically share your goals, opportunities, vantage point, and interests. The hope is that we'll be able to sort ourselves into compatible interests and ideas, to kick off more detailed discussion or collaborations.

Some suggested questions to spur discussion:

- What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously? - What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation? - On the other hand, what projects or conversations should be happening, but are not happening yet? - Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space? - What vision do you have for functional programming in education? That is, what general principles guide your thinking?

I will reply with my own answers, and encourage you to do the same.

Thanks, Chris

P.S. I realize this email is long past due. Between my job as a software engineer, volunteer teaching, and recent development on CodeWorld, I have again fallen into the trap of over-committing myself and falling behind on outside commitments. I hope that late is still better than never. _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@haskell.org https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/education

Chris Smith> - What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously? I have taught elective courses in functional programming using Haskell, Scala, or Elixir to advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students in a US public university. My students typically have programming experience in an imperative language such as Java, with no exposure to functional programming previously. Recently I have taught a junior/senior-level required core course in Programming Languages primarily using Haskell. Chris Smith> - What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation? Chris Smith> - On the other hand, what projects or conversations should be happening, but are not happening yet? Chris Smith> - Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space? Although there have come to be quite a few books on functional programming that use one language or another, there are not many real textbooks suitable for use in a college class. In particular, there is a scarcity of textbook options for courses other than just programming---such as algorithms and data structures, software engineering, programming language organization, artificial intelligence, data science, etc. Conrad

I guess I should answer my own questions, too! I'm Chris Smith. By day, I am a software engineer at Google. I lead the backend engineering team for Google Classroom, which is a part of GSuite for Education that helps teachers and students communicate about announcements and questions, submit assignments and grade and return them, things like that. That's all pretty boring. I fell in love with functional programming about the same time I really fell in love with mathematics, in the mid 2000s. I started with the SICP lectures here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY&list=PLE18841CABEA24090, in which Miranda was described in a way that really appealed to me. I ran across Haskell after discovering that Miranda wasn't really still around! I've also been involved in education most of my life. My first job after flunking out of college in the late 90s was working for a company teaching technology skills to IT professionals. I started and ran my first organization in the early 2000s to teach science and mathematics to homeschooled children in the early 2000s, and coached kids in a science competition there for 6 years. In 2010, I had a neighbor who was a school teacher, but quit her job to start her own school. There, I volunteered to teach a combination My involvement with education in Haskell has been entirely based on the CodeWorld project (http://code.world, or http://code.world/haskell). CodeWorld is many things; chief among them being: (1) my own volunteer work teaching middle school students in 6 different schools and several other programs run by non-profit organizations, (2) a web-based environment for writing and running simple Haskell code in a web browser with no setup or installation, (3) a graphics library similar to Gloss that works in this environment, (4) a simplified variant of the Haskell programming language designed for teaching children, and (5) a collection of ideas, outlines, and resources for how to teach middle school mathematics skills (roughly, what's known in the U.S. as "pre-algebra" and basic algebra) from a different perspective via functional programming. The core of CodeWorld has been, up to this point, mainly a one-person project, but I'm grateful for some very fruitful collaborations. Notably, Stefan Jacholke http://stefanj.me/funblocks/, Eric Roberts (can't find a good link), and Krystal Maughan https://medium.com/@krystal.maughan/breaking-the-space-time-barrier-with-has..., and others have done great work as part of Summer of Haskell and Summer of Code projects; Joachim Breitner spearheaded development of networked multi-player support https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3110247 in the CodeWorld library, and Brooklyn Cook, Chelsea Harper, Elisabeth Edeen, Christian Mirra, David Gladstein, Carl Young, and many others have contributed to the quite daunting task of developing various educational resources and plans (a task that I still haven't really succeeded at). And, of course, it would be nowhere without the support of the broader Haskell community, most notably Luite Stegeman for the development of GHCJS https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs. My reason for being in love with functional programming, both inside of education and outside, is that it has the same feeling as the best of mathematics. I've never been the most practical person, so despite being a software engineer for a living, I'm not so interested in teaching more people to be software engineers or using functional programming "in production". Instead, I'm interested in this because I'm convinced we're getting at something more fundamental. I see the relationship between functional programming and mathematics as being somewhat akin to the relationship between literature and language skills, in this sense: The average child in the United States today reads nearly half a million words between their 12th and 13th birthdays, so even as schools do teach language skills, teachers can rely on their students having encountered and practiced their skills thoroughly outside of class. Mathematics teachers, though, have students who only do mathematics in any real sense inside the classroom. Entice children to do math practices outside of school is not likely to succeed, any more than trying to get them to do grammar worksheets would! What is needed, instead, is an activity they can be convinced to want for its own sake, which *requires* mathematics as its medium, just as they really only want to learn what happens to Harry and Ron and Hermione, and the reading and interpreting of words and sentences is just the necessary medium to get there. I think functional programming is that thing. We can inspire students to want to produce art and animations and games and explore computational simulations and puzzles, and then give them expressions, functions, and variables as the steps to get there. There's a lot more to say here. For example, why must it be functional programming? Answer: because if we care about mathematics, then we want functions and variables and expressions to actually act the way they do in mathematics! We want substitution to be our model of computation. We want terms to have meaning as mathematical objects, not as descriptions of actions by a CPU. But it's all been said before, and will be said many times again. Emmanuel Schanzer has given some great justifications in this direction with his Bootstrap http://www.bootstrapworld.org program, which is growing popular now and is based on Racket, with the happy result that even a lot of teachers without deep CS knowledge are familiar with this distinction. Here are some things I'd be very interested in, if anyone is so inspired. (a) Feedback on how CodeWorld can be more useful to the general Haskell community. At http://code.world/haskell is a version of CodeWorld that runs a standard GHCJS compiler for Haskell code. The graphics API is also available, but not required. My goal is to make it dead simple to invite new programmers to write Haskell, without needing to install anything or set up their own tools, and to make this tool meet the educational needs of the Haskell community. (This is notably different from http://code.world without the "/haskell" on the end; that environment is designed to meet my own goals around math education, separate from the Haskell community.) Most Haskell code using only base, bytestring, text, containers, etc. can already be used there, and I recently added QuickCheck to the library set. I'm interested in adding even more: for example, integration with Brent's diagrams library? reflex? gloss? anything else? I'd love to hear what anyone thinks is missing that would be useful. And if it's already useful, I'd love to see more people adopt this in encouraging others to try Haskell. I've collected a few ideas at https://github.com/google/codeworld/projects/8 and would love more feedback here. (b) Experiences shared by others who are doing similar things. I think we're likely all running into some of the same problems, and there's no reason not to learn from each other. There's a LOT to learn about effective teaching, and I'm convinced that when it comes to programming, there's a sense in which no one is very good at it yet. At least, I have a hard time finding anyone even talking about the biggest challenges I run into in practice; things like how to help students to generalize comfortably when writing expressions, or to convert their imperative intuitions into more declarative expressions, or quickly recognize the structure of expressions. (c) I'm always keeping my eyes open for anyone wanting to be involved in the CodeWorld project. That could mean: - Teaching with CodeWorld. I can definitely give you advice on connecting with schools, organizing your class, etc., and I'll be your personal support line. I'm even happy to chat regularly by email, phone, or video conference and personally advise you on your class. Just let me know how I can help. - Research collaborations. I'm participating in some research already about measuring the effect of teaching on mathematics achievement, but I think there's a lot of room for this community as a whole to gather results we can share about educational outcomes. If you're motivated to pursue something like that using CodeWorld, please let me know how I can help, whether it's software changes to the CodeWorld environment, or . - Developing specific features or changes that you think would be valuable or want to work on. I'm willing to work with anyone to merge their ideas into the project, so long as you're okay with designing things to avoid complexity for new users. Alternatively, if you are looking for a project with impact on education and functional programming and would like some ideas, feel free to get in touch and I can run through my list to see if anything excites you (though much of it is also on CodeWorld's issue tracker at https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues, especially under the "proposal" label https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Apr... ). - Helping with organization and release of educational materials. I've got a lot of stuff that I and others have created over the years: worksheets, tutorials and guides, curriculum outlines, lesson plans, videos, and even a comic book!. I think before it's useful, it's important to sort everything by quality. For teachers, a collection of teaching resources is only as useful as the minimum level of quality they can expect from it. I have a bunch of stuff as input to this process, capturing a lot that I've learned over the last eight years, but also an unfortunate combination right now of personal attachment that makes it hard to throw things out, and also just a level of exhaustion that makes me too willing to give up on improving quality sometimes. Someone who wants to help here would be amazing. - Even joining the project as a core maintainer on equal terms with myself. Obviously, this would involve first establishing that we have compatible visions for where things are headed, but consider this my announcement that I don't intend to be territorial, and indeed would be quite excited if someone else wanted to take on any kind of leadership role in the project. (d) If you're in New York (on weekdays) or Atlanta (on weekends) and just want to get together for dinner and chat, I'm usually up for that, too. Okay, I'll stop there. Thanks, Chris On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 5:19 PM Chris Smith wrote:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to education@haskell.org.

This mailing list grew out of discussions at ICFP 2018 about creating a space for collaboration and discussion of using Haskell and other functional programming languages in general education. To jump-start that process, I'd like to invite everyone to introduce themselves and specifically share your goals, opportunities, vantage point, and interests. The hope is that we'll be able to sort ourselves into compatible interests and ideas, to kick off more detailed discussion or collaborations.

Some suggested questions to spur discussion:

- What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously? - What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation? - On the other hand, what projects or conversations should be happening, but are not happening yet? - Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space? - What vision do you have for functional programming in education? That is, what general principles guide your thinking?

I will reply with my own answers, and encourage you to do the same.

Thanks, Chris

P.S. I realize this email is long past due. Between my job as a software engineer, volunteer teaching, and recent development on CodeWorld, I have again fallen into the trap of over-committing myself and falling behind on outside commitments. I hope that late is still better than never.

Hi all, I'm Fernando Alegre. I am working on developing curriculum for high school computer science courses. The first course I developed, called Introduction to Computational Thinking, has been running as a pilot in several high schools in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for two years. The course uses Chris's CodeWorld platform, so that schools do not need to install anything. The course covers relatively little content in terms of computer science, but it is heavier on the math than other introductory courses, including Bootstrap. In the summer, I have a five-week all-day professional development program, where I have the teachers do all the activities in the course, so that they go from zero-knowledge in programming to being somewhat comfortable with teaching the course and helping students debug their code. I am also testing material for other courses with a couple of teachers and also directly with a small group of advanced students. I liked the CodeWorld environment so much that I decided I would try it with the advanced students, and the feedback I got has been very interesting. Apart from their dislike of the syntax and similar nuances, their main complaint is that functional programs are too dense, and that increases their cognitive load too much, so that, even though they can write the code, they do not enjoy doing it. I am struggling to find ways to make it more enjoyable for them, as it is really fun for me. I someone is interested, I can provide more details about all that. Regards, Fernando

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. https://www.snoyman.com/blog/2018/08/kids-coding-part-1 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. On Sun, Dec 16, 2018 at 12:20 AM Chris Smith wrote:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to education@haskell.org.

This mailing list grew out of discussions at ICFP 2018 about creating a space for collaboration and discussion of using Haskell and other functional programming languages in general education. To jump-start that process, I'd like to invite everyone to introduce themselves and specifically share your goals, opportunities, vantage point, and interests. The hope is that we'll be able to sort ourselves into compatible interests and ideas, to kick off more detailed discussion or collaborations.

Some suggested questions to spur discussion:

- What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously? - What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation? - On the other hand, what projects or conversations should be happening, but are not happening yet? - Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space? - What vision do you have for functional programming in education? That is, what general principles guide your thinking?

I will reply with my own answers, and encourage you to do the same.

Thanks, Chris

P.S. I realize this email is long past due. Between my job as a software engineer, volunteer teaching, and recent development on CodeWorld, I have again fallen into the trap of over-committing myself and falling behind on outside commitments. I hope that late is still better than never. _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@haskell.org https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/education

Greetings everyone, I'm Nick Bathum. These days I work as a software developer and do some volunteering for the VEX robotics community in northern Michigan. I'm an action oriented person, and I am here to connect with educators, and especially those with an interest in mathematics or functional programming enthusiasts. I also have to say that as a person currently far outside of academia, I am looking forward to hearing perspectives from folks who are closer to that world. I'm currently endeavoring to become connected with the teachers in my area who are teaching the new "STEM" or computer science classes that our K-12 schools in the region have recently adopted. My intent is to see what sorts of issues they are struggling with and if there is an opportunity where I can plug in and assist them. So what is the motivation or reason for introducing CS as a new curriculum in K-12 programs? I'd like to share some of my thoughts on that matter, not to provide an answer, but to get some feedback. The K-12 mathematics curriculum in the USA seems to be very structured and established, especially since the adoption of the common core initiative. I know not all states have adopted the core mathematics -or any of the core- standards, but at least where I live this is true. At the same time schools have begun offering extracurricular programs like robotics or hiring new teachers and offering regular classes under the STEM banner such as AP Computer Science. These new course offerings seem to be less structured, sometimes logistically complicated -- like teaching 4 different sets of course content to one "class", and overall the teachers of these courses seem to have less support in terms of community and teaching tools. My aim is to connect with a local teacher, learn from them and help them any way I am able, and additionally pursue a larger goal of exploring how to help reinforce the mathematics curriculum rather than take away from it. In terms of FP in education, my sense is that both functional and declarative languages would seem to be the most aligned with mathematics, conceptually and linguistically. However it seems the exception that computer programming courses begin with that content rather than the most used or popular language du jour. I also see some of Johannes points, and agree that simply exploring mathematics without a computer would perhaps be most effective way for students to learn mathematics. My thought is that if schools are going to introduce new computer programming classes, can we find ways for these classes to become companions to the existing classes and attach to the existing bodies of knowledge? Regards, -Nick On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 5:20 PM Chris Smith wrote:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to education@haskell.org.

This mailing list grew out of discussions at ICFP 2018 about creating a space for collaboration and discussion of using Haskell and other functional programming languages in general education. To jump-start that process, I'd like to invite everyone to introduce themselves and specifically share your goals, opportunities, vantage point, and interests. The hope is that we'll be able to sort ourselves into compatible interests and ideas, to kick off more detailed discussion or collaborations.

Some suggested questions to spur discussion:

- What education-related projects are you involved in, or have you been involved in previously? - What other projects do you find exciting, intriguing, or worthy of emulation? - On the other hand, what projects or conversations should be happening, but are not happening yet? - Is there anything specific that you are definitely looking for from this space? - What vision do you have for functional programming in education? That is, what general principles guide your thinking?

I will reply with my own answers, and encourage you to do the same.

Thanks, Chris

P.S. I realize this email is long past due. Between my job as a software engineer, volunteer teaching, and recent development on CodeWorld, I have again fallen into the trap of over-committing myself and falling behind on outside commitments. I hope that late is still better than never. _______________________________________________ Education mailing list Education@haskell.org https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/education

-- Regards, -NB

By way of introduction: I'm CEO of a small software company in Southern Germany, which also offers training in functional programming and software architecture. I am the founder of the DeinProgramm educational initiative (alas, in German): http://www.deinprogramm.de/ This is closely aligned with PLT's Program by Design / How to Design Program, and comes with its own textbook. The pedagogy of these projects is based on the idea of *design recipes* - explicit instructions for building programs starting with a systematic data analysis. DrRacket also ships with DeinProgramm-specific teaching languages. My experience has been that Program by Design is a hugely successful intro to programming/algebra/FPfor a wide variety of learners. In particular, having programming languages tailored for beginners is crucial. DrRacket has a huge headway here, and most teachers are well-advised to make use of it instead of trying to devise their own pedagogy or go with their own favorite language. Consequently, I don't think Haskell, as-is, is an appropriate language for teaching beginners. However, as the design recipes are very much types-based, they also apply to Haskell, and Haskell is a great second language to go to from Program by Design. (When we do 3-day professional Haskell training, we do 2 days of Program by Design and one day of Haskell - we usually get to monads.) -- Regards, Mike