in my textbook
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| Introduction | Calendar | Pictures used in my textbook |
How to Design Programs Textbook |
Examples | Daily Survey | Design recipes |
If this is your first visit to this page, please read the
Introduction
for an overview of what the workshop is about, why it might be relevant
to your teaching, and what other
teachers have said about the approach.
If you're interested in attending, please
read more and sign up for
a workshop.
If you've already registered to attend, please see
Local Information for directions, schedules, travel
tips, reimbursement rules, etc.
The current series of TeachScheme!, ReachJava workshops (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010) grew out of over ten years of TeachScheme! workshops, of which I ran three in July 2003, July 2002, and July 2001, as well as condensed versions of the workshop in June, 2000 (8 hours) and January, 2001 (2 hours).
There are two major difference between TeachScheme! and the current workshops: first, the current workshops are targeted primarily at college-level faculty rather than high school and middle school teachers; and second, we're hoping to cover both a Scheme-based introduction and a Java-based followup course in a week. As a result, these workshops will be quite intense and fast-paced.
On the first day, I'd like participants to fill out a
survey (on paper) so I know how many people teach
college, high school, etc, how many people teach what subjects,
and what you're expecting from this workshop.
At the end of each day, please fill out a
two-minute
on-line survey
to give us some
feedback on what topics made sense to you, what was unclear, etc.
in that particular day.
There will be yet another survey at the end of the workshop, and you'll
probably be contacted by our outside evaluator in a few months to find
out what effect the workshop has actually had on your teaching.
The software we're using, DrScheme, is available for free download for Mac, Windows, and Unix. Version 4.0.1 (aka 401) was just released last week, and I hope to use it for our workshop, but in case something goes wrong, we'll fall back on the previous stable release, version 372.
We'll be using some additional libraries this week that plug into DrScheme; see here for instructions to download, install, and use them on your own computer (they're already installed on the lab computers).
The textbook I've used a number of times for my first-semester course is How to Design Programs, by Matthias Felleisen et al at Rice University. The book is available in print from MIT Press, but it will remain available on-line for free.
I'm writing an updated textbook based on HtDP, but aimed at high school and less-elite-college students, particularly the mathophobic ones, and will use it for the first day or so of our workshop; let me know if you're interested in classroom-testing it. It too will probably be available on-line for free, once I've finished it.
I've summarized the Design Recipe(s) covered in this workshop, and some additional ones covered in my first-semester course. Use them!
For one example of how this material is used in a course, see my Programming for Poets course.
Viera Proulx, at Northeastern University, has had more experience than anyone else at teaching a full-year introductory sequence using this approach; see her teaching page.
You might also be interested in Jack Crouch's CS1 Web site. Jack Crouch teaches a 9th-grade course on beginning programming, using Scheme, DrScheme, and How to Design Programs.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 618543 and previous Grant No. 0010064. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.