Forty hours of declarative programming
Contents
1. yoauoou 7 djay 10109 2911 19595 H MD OX 40 5 6 0 amnsqns 201 aymysqns Figure 1 An incomplete proof Forty hours of declarative programming 58 xaje pep A Z yuaued 47 A A x juazed A 84 UO BY LE 151 4 WO anu Jorg 2 607 pue gt PRN gt X 5 20 ewe 2 0 z o 0 eaq juased xaje eaq juased ewe 5 0 gt X 9 0 0 5 0 gt X p p2. Miran Lipovaca 2011 Learn You a Haskell for Great Good A Beginner s Guide st edition No Starch Press San Francisco CA USA Available at http learnyouahaskell com Ben Lippmeier 2010 Gloss Available at http gloss ouroborus net J Maloney L Burd Y Kafai N Rusk B Silverman amp M Resnick 2004 Scratch A Sneak Preview In Second International Conference on Creating Connecting and Collaborating through Computing pp 104 109 doi 10 1109 C5 2004 1314376 Conor McBride amp James McKinna 2004 The view from the left Journal of Functional Programming 14 1 69 111 doi 10 1017 S0956796803004829 Ulf Norell 2007 Towards a practical programming language based on dependent type theory Ph D thesis Chalmers University of Technology Simon Peyton Jones editor 2003 Haskell 98 Language and Libraries The Revised Report Cambridge University Press Emmanuel Schanzer Bootstrap Available at http www bootstrapworld org Chris Smith 2011 Haskell for Kids Available at http cdsmith wordpress com category haskell for kids Wouter Swierstra S Doaitse Swierstra amp Jurri n Stutterheim 2011 Logisch en Functioneel Programmeren voor Wiskunde D Technical Report UU CS 2011 033 Universiteit Utrecht
3. http snapframework com Matthew J Conway 1997 Alice Easy to Learn 3D Scripting for Novices Ph D thesis University of Virginia Microsoft Corporation Microsoft Small Basic An introduction to programming Tutorial available online Atze Dijkstra Jeroen Fokker amp S Doaitse Swierstra 2009 The Architecture of the Utrecht Haskell Com piler In Haskell Symposium doi 10 1145 1596638 1596650 Atze Dijkstra Jeroen Fokker amp S Doaitse Swierstra 2009 UHC Utrecht Haskell Compiler Available at Atze Dijkstra Jurri n Stutterheim Alessandro Vermeulen amp S Doaitse Swierstra Building JavaScript ap plications with Haskell Accepted for IFL 2012 Matthias Felleisen Robert Bruce Findler Matthew Flatt amp Shriram Krishnamurthi 2003 How to Design Programs An Introduction to Programming and Computing Roy Thomas Fielding 2000 Architectural Styles and the Design of Network based Software Architectures Ph D thesis University of California Irvine M Flatt 2010 PLT Reference Racket Technical Report Technical Report PLT TR 2010 1 PLT Inc 2010 http racket lang org tr1 Sal Khan Khan Academy Available at http www khanacademy org computer science Xavier Leroy Damien Doligez Alain Frisch Jacques Garrigue Didier R my amp J r me Vouillon 2011 The OCaml system release 3 12 Documentation and user s manual Technical Report Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique
4. steps This is a bit subtle you need to keep track of a list of cities that you have already visited to ensure that you do not loop Finally we asked the students to extend this simple algorithm to also compute the shortest path using iterative deepening All in all the students tend to write a small amount of code a project is typically between 30 to 100 lines of Prolog In the bigger programs a large part of the code often consists of enumerations of various base cases The students find it challenging to have to start from scratch but at the same time they enjoy the creative freedom associated with programming 3 NanoProlog Interpreter To allow students to play with Prolog and for the really fast learners to learn how a Prolog interpreter works we have written a small Prolog interpreter of our own called NanoProlog The core of our interpreter consists of 150 lines of Haskell excluding the parser and main I O loop This section aims to give you an idea of how our NanoProlog interpreter works The complete source code is available from Hackage as the NanoProlog package We hope that it is simple enough that motivated students with our help will be able to understand how this interpreter implements Prolog s backtracking search The central data types we use to represent Prolog programs are defined as follows data Term Var String Fun String data Rule Term lt type Program Rule A Prolog
5. 0 xaje juaied p0 xaje juased ewe 5 Q Aand ewe 49391d19 U based interpreter Figure 2 A proof found by the web J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra 59 to install their software and can experiment freely with our tools For many of the larger projects the students do use SWI Prolog that is already installed on the university computers Implementation We have implemented both the client and the server part of the application entirely in Haskell On the server side we use the Snap Framework to expose a RESTful 8 API to the NanoProlog interpreter and a database in which we store the Prolog rules the user has defined On the client side we make use of the Utrecht Haskell Compiler s UHC JavaScript back end 6 This enables us to write Haskell code and cross compile it to JavaScript which is run in the students browser Earlier revisions of the software were implemented in plain JavaScript and delegated parsing terms unification and proof verification to the NanoProlog library on the server By compiling the NanoProlog library to JavaScript these operations can be executed client side eliminating additional AJAX requests The theorem prover part of the application the first mode of operation is imple mented completely in Haskell and is running entirely on the client Unfortuna
6. Forty hours of declarative programming Teaching Prolog at the Junior College Utrecht Jurri n Stutterheim Wouter Swierstra Doaitse Swierstra Department of Information and Computing Sciences Universiteit Utrecht P O Box 80 089 3508 TB Utrecht The Netherlands j stutterheim w s swierstra doaitse uu nl This paper documents our experience using declarative languages to give secondary school students a first taste of Computer Science The course aims to teach students a bit about programming in Prolog but also exposes them to important Computer Science concepts such as unification or searching strategies Using Haskell s Snap Framework in combination with our own NanoProlog library we have developed a web application to teach this course 1 Introduction The Junior College Utrecht JCU is a joint initiative of Utrecht University and 26 local secondary schools The JCU offers talented students already interested in science a choice of several short courses at several different departments of the Faculty of Science of Utrecht University In their penultimate year of secondary school when the students are approximately seventeen years old students may do a small research project that encompasses approximately 40 hours of work including the preparation of a final report and a presentation Students spend two and a half days performing experiments followed by two days of preparing their final presentation and report On the last afternoon s
7. Term is either a variable or a function constant applied to a list of terms To simplify parsing we require all variables to start with a capital letter all constants should start with a lower case letter A Rule describes a single Prolog inference rule The 1 ts states that to prove the goal it is sufficient to prove each sub goal in the list 15 For example a Prolog rule such as ancestor X Y parent Z Y ancestor X Z will be parsed as Fun ancestor Var X Var Y Fun parent Var 2 ancestor Var 2 Var Finally a program consists of a list of such rules The Prolog interpreter takes a program as input together with a goal query It constructs an inhabitant of the following Result type J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra 55 newtype Env Env fromEnv Map String Term data Result Done Env Apply Result The answers we are looking for are substitutions mapping variables to Prolog terms We represent such substitutions as environments using Haskell s Data Map library If the answer to our query is simple enough there might not be any variables and the environment may be empty The Result data type represents the search tree that is built up during resolution It has two constructors the Done constructor returns the required solution the Apply branches over all possible rules that can be applied to solve the current goal The reso
8. al user interface of a custom IDE It is targeted at post secondary education students Scratch provides a drag and drop interface to programming in a custom IDE The language itself is imperative with an event driven concurrency model The language has a simple but intuitive type system that shows types as different shapes Scratch is aimed at children between 8 and 16 years of age Microsoft have developed Small Basic 3 to encourage people to learn how to program Small Basic is a simplified Basic dialect The IDE is simple and intuitive and focuses on providing information about the Small Basic libraries API It has a similar target audience to Khan Academy Conclusion The module we teach is aimed at secondary school students Besides teaching them a bit about computer programming we aim to teach them about Computer Science We expose them to concepts such as unification and substitution explain search trees and search algorithms and teach them to solve problems using recursion We then proceed to show them how these concepts are implemented in an interpreter by showing an implementation in Haskell We feel that this really distinguishes our course from many of the existing approaches already available 62 Forty hours of declarative programming References Gregory Collins Doug Beardsley Shu yu Guo James Sanders Carl Howells Shane O Brien Ozgun Ata man Chris Smith amp Jurri n Stutterheim Snap Framework Available at
9. can instruct the computer to do what they tell it Instead of simply consuming the applications others have written students learn that a computer is a programmable device that they can control themselves Once we decided that we wanted to teach a programming language the next question is of course which language to teach Should we teach a mainstream programming language such as Java or C Or should we teach a toy language such as Alice or Scratch 14 Or should we teach languages M and Achten Eds Trends in Functional Programming in Education 2012 TFPIE 2012 EPTCS 106 2013 pp 5062 doi 10 4204 EPTCS 106 4 J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra 51 popular in the functional programming language research community such as Agda 16 Epigram I5 OCaml 11 Racket 9 or Haskell 17 We opted for none of the above The following requirements helped us to determine our choice of language The language needs to be simple Students should be up and running as quickly as possible As we only have approximately two and a half days to teach the students we want a language with minimal opportunity for making syntax errors or type errors and getting incomprehensible compiler messages as a result The language needs to be non trivial Many introductory programming languages target a younger pre teen audience by offering drag amp drop IDEs and focussing on drawing and or animating im ages The
10. e freedom to work on a small research project but still provides enough guidance Student Reflection Throughout the course the students were under constant supervision which al lowed them to frequently ask questions While working through the course notes the concept that the students seem to struggle with most was the scope of variables The students found it hard to keep in mind that a variable X in one rule is not the same variable X in another rule especially in the case of recursion Luckily by the time they moved on to their projects this confusion had nearly completely disappeared 60 Forty hours of declarative programming At the end of their research project all of the students are required to reflect on their research by writing a short report We summarize the experiences of the spring 2011 class here which consisted of eleven students Some of them had some prior programming experience but most did not Especially the students without programming experience indicated that they did not really know what Computer Science was or how difficult the course was going to be Some even indicated that this was an important reason for choosing to take part in this project Despite the lack of prior experience nearly all of the students enjoyed the course even if they found it to be quite challenging Many students would have liked to have had more time They would have liked to get a better understanding of what they were doing and to be ab
11. em prover and as a Prolog interpreter In the first mode we aim to teach the students how unification and backtracking work Students can enter a Prolog query and then try to prove it themselves by dragging and dropping rules from a list onto the query thereby constructing a proof tree Dropping a rule on a term unifies the conclusion of the rule with that term The body of the rule may then introduce new sub goals expanding the proof tree This is repeated until all the proof tree s leaves are basic Prolog facts and the proof is complete A student can ask for feedback while working on the proof When a branch of the tree still has open sub goals its leaves are rendered with a yellow background indicating that there is still some work to be done Nodes that have been successfully completed turn green When all nodes have turned green the proof is complete and the student is congratulated with a message box Figure I on the facing page shows an incomplete proof The root node has successfully been proved but its children still contain open goals By dragging and dropping the rules listed on the right on the open sub goals the students can complete the proof Variables can be substituted in two ways When a rule s conclusion is unified with an open sub goal a substitution is produced and applied to the entire tree Alternatively the students can manually apply a substitution by using the controls just below the proof tree The seco
12. eneral audience of parents teachers from other disciplines and fellow students that have chosen other topics at the JCU In practice the students utilize this day to continue work on their research project as well J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra 53 Day5 At the end of the day the students will need to present their projects to a general audience of both parents and teachers hence this day is mostly concerned with practising and improving the presentations One week after the final presentations the students have to hand in their report 22 Course material The lecture notes provided to the students provides them with an introduction to Prolog and its imple mentation The course notes start with a short introduction on substitutions equations and variables in terms of the high school mathematics with which the students are already familiar On the surface this has little to do with programming but it aims to fix some terminology before introducing Prolog Next they learn a bit about Prolog through a series of examples starting with a set of relations to describe a family tree The first queries they write themselves are along the lines of Who are the children of Alice or Who are Bob s grandparents By practicing with these simple examples they gain some basic familiarity with Prolog but also learn the difference between existential and universal quantification To understand simple rules such as gra
13. esearch projects take the form of a more open ended challenge Many students choose to use the Prolog interpreter already present on the lab machines rather than use the web interface This allows them to use a regular text editor to write their programs and use some of the features of Prolog that our simple interpreter does not support such as special syntax for natural numbers The projects they work on are quite varied Some are inspired by Sudoku like puzzles such as Kakuro Others build on the family tree example asking them to define new family relations or to extend the relations with some basic genetics e g if both your parents exhibit the same recessive trait you share that trait Furthermore we offer them a choice of several other Prolog programming task such as defining a toy route planner system or simple scheduling software Finally we suggest several projects 54 Forty hours of declarative programming that modify the interpreter such as implementing a breadth first search or adding a cut operator These last exercises tend to be quite daunting To give you a better idea of the kind of project the students write we will briefly discuss the routing software that one team wrote last year They started with having to define a binary relation between a fixed number of cities that represents that two cities are immediately connected They then extended this to a recursive relation that holds if two cities are connected by zero or more
14. language should be challenging enough to intrigue clever seventeen year old secondary school students A language like Scratch for example is great for simple animations and games but it does not illustrate what real Computer Science is about and how real world problems can be solved by programming The language needs to create a level playing field Some students already have programming experience when starting the JCU course This can be extremely discouraging for students without prior programming experience Inexperienced students may get the incorrect impression that they are not suitable for a degree in Computer Science The students have no experience with Computer Science The Mathematics course taught at their secondary schools where they learn some elementary calculus and geometry is the closest related subject To engage the students the language we choose should relate to what they already know In the end we settled upon a fragment of Prolog This may seem like a peculiar choice so we would like to provide some further motivation for this decision The students have no trouble learning the syntax Typically they are writing their first Prolog relations within hours Had we tried to teach Java for example we would need a significant amount of time to explain what public static void means and how to deal with curly braces and semi colons Choosing Prolog avoids these problems altogether They can solve non trivial problem
15. le to do more programming Even though the web application and interpreter were available for exploring Prolog the students indicated that they were glad that they had the opportunity to ask questions in class The spring 2012 class had more extensive lecture notes to work with which also contained several exercises The students whom we spoke to indicated that this greatly helped them in understanding the theory Half of those students also indicated that taking part in this course made them strongly consider choosing a Computer Science education Our experience Having run the course for two years now we would like to reflect further on our experience First of all is Prolog a good choice In the introduction we motivated our choice for Prolog it is a simple language with interesting semantics that we expect very few students to have studied already In our experience students enjoyed learning Prolog They get started almost immediately as the syntax is extremely lightweight Students can get frustrated at times many are not used to the precision necessary to write computer programs Missing parentheses are an all too common mistake Perhaps better IDE support or a structure editor would help Students enjoy learning to program They enjoy the intellectual challenge and seeing their code work Unfortunately once they have finished their projects we think it is unlikely they will continue programming in Prolog One student explicitly asked wha
16. lution process now proceeds in two steps we begin by constructing a Result data type By traversing this tree in any order we can search for answers The solve function below forms the heart of our interpreter The function unifies the current goal with the conclusion of every possible rule When unification succeeds we proceed by resolving the right hand side of the rule together with any remaining goals When an Apply node does not have any children this represents a dead end with no possible solutions type Goal Term solve Program Goal Result solve rules goal steps Env empty goal where steps Env Goal Result steps Done e steps e 2 25 Apply steps cs 25 ccs lt rules Juste lt unify g c Just e The actual implementation also tracks which rules are applied at every step so that we can not only return the successful substitutions but also the trace of all the rules that were applied to construct this solution The unify code is shown below When the unify function is applied to two terms and a non empty environment the two terms are unified after the variables in the terms have been substituted by values from the environment If one of the two terms is a variable a substitution from the variable to the other term is inserted in the environment If both terms are a Fun the right hand sides of the rules are unified if and only if both rules have the same name and
17. nd way the students can use the application is by using it as an interpreter Figure page 58 illustrates this mode of development Students are presented with a single text field in which they can enter a Prolog query If the query can be proven using the rules on the right the interpreter will print the corresponding proof trees and substitutions on the screen Students can define new rules using the text field at the bottom right Before being able to use the application students need to register This enables us to store a set of rules for each individual student giving them their own playground to experiment with Prolog Having a web application that the students can access from home is a huge advantage The students do not need 57 J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra A Zhuaed 47 A A A UO y 15 4 Jorg 2 607 gt MSIN 5 Joa ar jooud
18. ndparent X Y parent X Z parent 2 You already need to understand that X and Y are universally quantified and that Z is existentially quanti fied We introduce recursion very early on starting with a definition of an ancestors relation We then move on to simple Peano arithmetic using recursion to define addition and multiplication Once they have seen Peano arithmetic the next step is to study simple list processing We show how to define simple functions such as length and append in Prolog This all builds up to a mini Sudoku solver This Sudoku solver itself merely formally describes what a solution is leaving the search to Prolog s resolution mechanism We start by defining predicates that state that a given list contains no duplicates Using this we define that all the rows and columns of a given board have no duplicates It is then up to the students to complete the solver by defining what it means for the boxes of a Sudoku puzzle to have no duplicates Having completed the Sudoku solver the course notes shift towards describing how Prolog resolution works At first we present a pseudo code algorithm exposing the students to concepts such as unifica tion search trees and depth first search The final chapter of the notes explains how this pseudo code can be implemented in Haskell 2 3 Projects Once the students have worked their way through the lecture notes they start their own short research project The r
19. nts can easily write an run their programs without having to decipher type error messages first We have developed a web application to support this course The application consists of two modes of operation a web based interface to our Prolog interpreter and an interactive Prolog proof assistant This application including its browser based front end was built entirely in Haskell using the Snap web framework and the Utrecht Haskell Compiler UHC In the following sections we will discuss the structure of our course Section B the implementation of our Prolog interpreter Section the interactive proof assistant Section and the students experience working on this course using these tools Section 5 2 Course setup 21 Planning As the title of this paper suggests we only have a very limited amount of time to teach this course Unfortunately this time constraint is put in place by the JCU itself and is not something we as teachers of an individual pre thesis track can easily change In practice we only have five days of about 6 to 7 5 hours each to introduce the students to Prolog and assist them in doing their research project preparing their presentation and writing their report The entire course is roughly structured as follows Day 1 We meet the students for the first time After a short introduction the students form teams of preferably two but if need be three people With the teams formed they start reading our lec
20. rned to program Of course they have plenty to learn before they can write any kind of application but we feel that all the students take their first steps in computer programming however small these may be Did the students learn about Computer Science Yes and no As we mentioned above all the students finish the course with a much clearer idea of what Computer Science is They are exposed to concepts such as J Stutterheim W S Swierstra amp S D Swierstra 61 algorithms and search trees but they would need further practice to understand these abstract concepts completely For example we believe that most students could visit a tree in depth first order but very few could give an accurate pseudo code implementation of depth first search Finally we learned the importance of setting up a stable teaching environment Despite having tested our web application before the project started students still managed to break things in unexpected ways Having SWI Prolog installed on the machines was a good fall back option Related Work There are several similar initiatives aimed at teaching programming to secondary school students Boot strap is a curriculum aimed at middle school children of ages 11 to 14 It focuses on teaching kids how to program video games using algebraic and geometric concepts that they know from their mathe matics classes As such the curriculum is designed to work in conjunction with the regular middle school program I
21. s by writing out a precise mathematical specification In our course for instance the students develop a small Sudoku solver After the students have developed a specification of what a valid solution to a Sudoku problem is Prologs search automatically provides them with a Sudoku solver In the remainder of the course the students can cover a wide variety of problem domains including scheduling problems routing problems basic genetics and logical brainteasers In each of these domains they learn how to formalize some abstract concept resulting in an executable program Using Prolog gives us the opportunity to teach the students about backtracking unification proof trees and many other important concepts We hope that by doing so they learn there is more to Computer Science than just programming We can teach them how an interpreter works We have implemented a minimal interpreter for Prolog in Haskell and use this to teach our students a bit about functional programming Not all students study this material but the students with previous programming experience find this by far the most interesting part of the course Prolog has no type system While reasoning about types is an important aspect in the functional programming courses at Utrecht University teaching the JCU students about types and have them 52 Forty hours of declarative programming write interesting programs within 40 hours seems unrealistic In Prolog the stude
22. t consists of nine units and some supplemental lessons Students work with the functional pro gramming languages Racket and Scheme It also offers a web based environment in which the children can write and execute code and see the result appear in the web browser Haskell for Kids targets a similar audience as Bootstrap namely children around the age of 12 or 13 It teaches the basics of Haskell programming by letting the children draw images and even animations using the Gloss library 13 Similarly to bootstrap Haskell for Kids offers a web based development interface How to Design Programs 7 15 a book with content similar to our curriculum It teaches Scheme as a core subject for a liberal arts education It differs not only in the target audience but also in focus it teaches the student to write programs with underlying concepts as an aside whereas we focus on teaching the student about the underlying concepts with learning how to program as an aside Khan Academy offers a collection of introductory video lectures on Python Exercises are not included The target audience is not specified but the level of the videos suggests that it is aimed at teenagers and above Alice 2 takes a more graphical approach to teaching programming It focusses on visual learners by enabling them to drag and drop objects into a program to create an animation or a game As opposed to the previous works it uses a Java like language wrapped in a graphic
23. t language do I learn next This is a clear drawback of our choice for Prolog Teaching a language such as JavaScript that they have running in their browser already would increase the chance that the students continue programming at home The downside of using JavaScript however is the higher barrier to entry We would need to spend more time explaining syntax for instance Perhaps the Racket approach would work well here starting with a simple language fragment that is incrementally extended to a general purpose programming language One reviewer asked if it was too easy to guess the solution to the Prolog exercises This was not our experience at all In the interactive proof assistant sessions where students need to assemble a derivation this may be the case The students can try various rules until they find one that fits Even if they do produce derivations by trial and error we find that seeing the unification happening before their eyes can still be instructive The Prolog predicates we ask them to write are much harder to get right by trial and error As soon as any recursion is involved we believe the chances of guessing the right solution are very low We aimed to teach the students programming and Computer Science How much do they really learn in the limited time we have available After completing the course the students have written a small program that computes something interesting starting from scratch In a sense they have lea
24. tely the JavaScript code generated by the UHC is not fast enough to run the graphical user interface to the interpreter the second mode of operation on the client completely Instead the user interface delegates the queries entered by the user to the server where the much faster native code interprets them and sends the results back to the client 5 Discussion Results As we mentioned in Section 2 we only have about two and a half days to teach the students The remaining time is reserved for the preparation of a presentation the writing of a final report and a mini symposium where all students across the different sciences present their results The first year we ran this course it was quite free form in part because we had not assembled all the required material Instead of spoon feeding the students we hoped that they would be capa ble of some individual exploration the JCU specifically aims to teach students how scientific research works In practice however these students regardless of how motivated they are are too young to work independently The second time we ran the course we provided the students much more structure We had prepared a set of course notes with numerous small exercises This gave the students a clear initial goal read the course notes complete the exercises and learn to use the web application After completing the notes the students embarked on their research projects This gave the students th
25. the same number of terms on the right hand side unify Term Term Maybe Env Maybe Env unify _ Nothing Nothing unify t u env Just e Env uni subst e t subst e where uni Varx y Just Env insert x y m uni x Var y Just Env insert y x m uni Fun x xs Fun y ys x y A length xs length ys foldr unify env zip xs ys uni _ Nothing 56 Forty hours of declarative programming The Subst typeclass is used to overload the subst function to work on terms lists of terms and rules class Subst t where subst Env t 1 instance Subst gt Subst where subst env map subst env instance Subst Term where subst env Var x maybe Var x subst env lookup fromEnv subst env Fun x cs Fun x subst env cs instance Subst Rule where subst cs subst subst env cs Our NanoProlog interpreter does have several restrictions There is no cut operator there is no way to define negation there are no built in integers strings lists IO or other functionality To keep the implementation minimal there is no occurs check Yet the resulting simple language is just enough to solve simple but interesting problems 4 Web Application To allow the students to experiment with Prolog without having to install any software themselves we have developed a web application The application has two modes of operation as an interactive theor
26. tudents present their projects to one another The courses consist of five full days spread over six weeks The students may indicate their preference for several different topics including biology veterinary science chemistry or mathematics Finally the students are distributed over the available courses taking their preferences and the available space on each course into account In the past two years we have developed a Computer Science course for these students 20 Choosing suitable material for such a course is not easy Part of the purpose of the JCU is to ignite the students interest in Computer Science While we want the students to learn a bit of computer programming the course should strive to teach more We would like our students to learn something about algorithms semantics programming language design and other abstract concepts from Computer Science In our experience very few students who start the course have a clear idea of what Computer Science is One of our main goals was to ensure that students that complete our course learn what Computer Science is and how it differs from Mathematics and other Sciences Finally we hope to encourage students to enrol at Utrecht University above all else the course should be fun Early on we decided that we wanted to teach the JCU students to program Seeing your own code execute on your computer for the first time is a magical experience Suddenly students become aware that they
27. ture notes and start working on the exercises we have prepared The exercises start off slowly with an introduction to substitutions Afterwards the lecture notes continue with an introduction to Prolog and depth first search The lecture notes conclude with an expla nation of how our Haskell implementation of a Prolog interpreter works Before students can study this chapter they are referred to the first two chapters of Learn You a Haskell 12 In practice very few of students get around to the Haskell part of the course Day 2 The students get some time to finish working on the lecture notes and ask questions about it Afterwards each team selects a research project and starts working on it Students can come up with their own project but since they generally cannot correctly determine the scope of a project themselves we present them with a list of projects from which to choose Day 3 Work continues on the research project and the students start working on a report in which they detail what they have learnt during the course This report is mostly aimed at the course s teachers and is expected to discuss the technical implementation details of their research project In addition the students are asked to reflect on how they executed their research and how they might improve in a future project Day 4 In addition to continuing work on their report the students start working on their presentation The presentation needs to be aimed at a g
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