Frank Huch
ABSTRACT
This paper presents an interactive framework for pupils to learn the basic concepts of programming by means of the functional programming language Erlang. Beside the idea of the framework we also sketch the different learning targets and exercises to deepen programming skills.
The framework was successfully utilized in a programming course for pupils in their last three school years.
- Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, Claes Wikström, and Mike Williams. Concurrent Programming in Erlang, Second Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1996. Google Scholar
Digital Library
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- W. Hartmann, J. Nievergelt, and R. Reichert. Kara, finite state machines, and the case for programming as part of general education. In HCC '01: Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'01), page 135, Washington, DC, USA, 2001. IEEE Computer Society. Google ScholarDigital Library
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- Frank Huch. Erlang specification method - a tool for the graphical specification of distributed systems. In Seventh International Erlang/OTP User Conference, 2001.Google Scholar
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- Richard E. Pattis. Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Programming. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1981. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Raimond Reichert. Programmieren lernen mit kara, available from http://www.swisseduc.ch/informatik/karatojava/.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Learning programming with erlang
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Reviews
Arthur Gittleman
Erlang is a concurrent, distributed, functional programming language. This paper addresses the need to program computers that commonly have multiple processors. The short course described here attempts to expose female high school students (15 to 18 years of age) to computer science in an interesting way. In Germany, where the course was given, as in the US, the percentage of female students in computer science is under 20 percent. Half of the included one-week course describes the university’s research, meetings with students and female graduates, a trip to a company, and curriculum information. The other half consists of teaching programming using Erlang, and is based on the Kara interactive development environment. Kara is a female ladybird that moves on a 10-by-10 grid. Kara can collect shamrocks, but must avoid a fly agaric, which can kill her. The Zurich developers of Kara used a finite automaton and Java to control Kara. In Section 2, the author convincingly proposes Erlang as a better alternative. Section 3 lists the special Erlang commands to control Kara, such as go() , which moves Kara one field ahead, and take() , which picks up a shamrock. Section 4 describes the teaching levels, including code that is easy to read, even without any prior knowledge of Erlang. The start-up with the small initial language takes only 45 minutes before the students are programming. The next level generalizes the use of recursive calls, which is surprisingly easy to grasp in this context of moving a ladybird on a grid. The course introduces parameters and data structures, and goes beyond Kara to introduce concurrent and distributed programming in Erlang. Student groups conclude by developing a chat server protocol. The concluding section discusses the advantages of Erlang-Kara. In the future, the author plans to integrate Erlang’s concurrency features into Kara to allow multiple ladybirds to solve a problem cooperatively. Because the paper was presented at Erlang 2007, which focuses on the language itself, the author does not present any follow-up information about the female students’ change in attitude toward computer science. However, the descriptions of what the students are able to do, and the obvious appeal of this approach, make it very promising, especially considering the growing need for students to understand concurrency, and the desire to increase the number of female computer scientists. Online Computing Reviews Service
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