The Pedagogy of Programming

I took programming courses in both high school and college, at least three or four all told (Basic and Pascal—I’m dating myself). I couldn’t have been less interested. The pedagogical approach was entirely vocational. Just as my French and Spanish courses revolved around hypothetical trips to Paris or Madrid (like I was going to get there any time soon), my programming courses were filled with unlikely scenarios that read like a cross between an inter-office memo and a GRE logic problem: “You own a small hardware store in Schenectady. Write a program that will display items in your inventory sorted in such and such a way, but not screwdrivers on Tuesdays when the moon is full.” That sort of thing. I can see in retrospect that lots of fundamentals were being taught here: variables, arrays, conditionals, control structures, sorts, loops, etc.—but there was nothing to engage my imagination, nothing to suggest why formal logic was a unique and powerful lens through which to view the world. Lately I’ve become interested in the pedagogy of programming, and I’m going to collect some initial links here. In no particular order:

• RAPUNSEL, by Mary Flanagan, Andrea Hollingshead, and Ken Perlin. “The RAPUNSEL research project team is researching and building a software environment to teach programming concepts to kids. Someday, it will be a multiuser game. For now, we are tackling small interactive modules. We think our approach will attract as many girls to programming as it will boys, and this might help out with the shortage of women in computer-related fields.”

• Processing, by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. “Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It was created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as an electronic sketchbook.”

• Nomic, by Peter Suber: “Nomic is a game I invented in 1982. It’s a game in which changing the rules is a move. The Initial Set of rules does little more than regulate the rule-changing process. While most of its initial rules are procedural in this sense, it does have one substantive rule (on how to earn points toward winning); but this rule is deliberately boring so that players will quickly amend it to please themselves.”

• Grow, by Eyemaze. Michael Mateas (of GTxA) comments, “When you first start playing, the placement of objects on the sphere and their transformations seem random - there’s no reason to prefer placing one object before another. Discovering the internal logic that governs the transformations of the initially abstract elements is the primary addictive pull of the game.”

• BlueJ, by a joint research group at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia, the Mærsk Institute at the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. “BlueJ is an integrated Java environment specifically designed for introductory teaching.”

Updates

• Via Jason: Squeak, by Alan Kay, et al. “Squeak is a project by some of the original pioneers of personal computing and networking, joined by enthusiastic more recent colleagues, to get wide spectrum authoring for all back into the mainstream of computing.”

• Via Liz: MUPPETS, by Andrew Phelps, et al. “Through capitalizing on research in the areas of gaming and virtual community social psychology, RIT is engaged in a project to develop a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) entitled “The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study” (MUPPETS).”

• Via Francois: Logo (of course), by Seymour Papert, et al. “The Logo Programming Language, a dialect of Lisp, was designed as a tool for learning. Its features - modularity, extensibility, interactivity, and flexibility -follow from this goal.”

• Via Andrés: Jeliot 3. “Jeliot 3 is a Program Visualization application. It visualizes how a Java program is interpreted. Method calls, variables, operation are displayed on a screen as the animation goes on, allowing the student to follow step by step the execution of a program. Programs can be created from scratch or they can be modifyed from previously stored code examples.”

• Via Geoff: Design By Numbers, by John Maeda, et al. “Design By Numbers was created for visual designers and artists as an introduction to computational design. . . . DBN is both a programming environment and language. The environment provides a unified space for writing and running programs and the language introduces the basic ideas of computer programming within the context of drawing. Visual elements such as dot, line, and field are combined with the computational ideas of variables and conditional statements to generate images.”

To be continued . . . suggestions welcome. As the above suggests, I’m interested in a pretty wide range of materials, from IDEs and other environments to games and conceptual tools. Special thanks to GrandTextAuto, where I first picked up several of these links.

Update 11/14/04: A number of excellent links, via Dirk Scheuring in the comments at GrandTextAuto:

• C++ tutorial for the uninitiated.

• Scheme: “Scheme is a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language invented by Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman. It was designed to have an exceptionally clear and simple semantics and few different ways to form expressions. A wide variety of programming paradigms, including imperative, functional, and message passing styles, find convenient expression in Scheme.”

• How to Design Programs.

• Instant Hacking: short introduction to Python, for the uninitiated.

• Squeak: “Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change.”

• Epigrams on Programming: speaks for itself.