Thank you all for your responses on this. These ideas/materials are very helpful. In particular, the John Harrison book looks excellent (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/Lectures/funprog-jrh-1996/index.html ) -- a comprehensive and understandable introduction to all the concepts I had in mind. (I'm not sure what my audience's attention span will be though.) The WhyFP paper is also very good, although doesn't go into monads or types, it does a good job of illustrating modularity/composability. I'll send an update if this study group gets off the ground, to let you all know how it worked out. Warren