Proceedings Second Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming In Education (1312.2216v1)

Abstract: The Second International Workshop on Trends in Functional Programming in Education, TFPIE 2013, was held on May 13, 2013 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA. The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, professors, teachers, and all professionals interested in functional programming in education. Submissions were vetted by the TFPIE 2013 program committee using prevailing academic standards. The 2 articles in this volume were selected for publication as the result of this process. Tobin-Hochstadt and Van Horn report on their solution to the difficult transition between the first semester course in functional programming (using languages, programming environment, etc. intended for teaching) to the second semester course in object-oriented programming (with a production-oriented language, environment, etc.). Finding that this confusing circumstance made the key concepts hard to grasp for students, the authors present and evaluate a new introduction to the second semester course, based on the environment and languages the students used before, that focusses on key object-oriented concepts. Caldwell lays out an education narrative that focusses on reasoning about programs, using structural induction principles. He argues that more such formal reasoning should get more emphasis in programming education and demonstrates the feasibility thereof by reporting on his experiences using this narrative in the functional programming course at the University of Wyoming.