ProgramByDesign: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:50, 29 January 2015

Revision as of 07:51, 30 January 2015

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of local public schools. His objective was to use functional programming to bring

mathematics alive and to help inject design knowledge into the introductory

[[computer science]] [[curriculum]].

The group raised funds from several private foundations, the US Department of Education, and the National Science Foundation to create

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grade school courses on arithmetic and middle/high school courses on

pre/algebra. Teachers program them with rules and run specific problems via

exercises. The key is that students execute purely functional programs.

If we can turn students into teachers that create functional programs and run them

on computers, we can reinforce this content and show students how writing down

mathematics and how writing down functional programs creates lively animated scenes

and even computer games.

Here is an example:

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columns where each column contains ''t'' at the top and an appropriate image at

the bottom. That is, if the numbers increase from left to right, then on each image the

red dot is a little bit lower.

Finally the animate line applies the given function, create-image, at the

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children would have more fun with such "live" functions than with algebraic

expressions that count the number of garden tiles [see Prentice Hall books for

grades 8-9].

The ProgramByDesign project proposes that both traditional mathematics as well as

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photographers. Thus, an introductory course in programming would not be perceived as a

place where students learn about the syntax of the currently fashionable (and soon-to-be-obsolete) programming

languages, but a place where they can learn something widely applicable.

The key design element of the ProgramByDesign curriculum is the ''design recipe''.

It has two dimensions: the process dimension and the data dimension.

Along the process dimension students learn that there are six steps to designing a

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program skeleton. Each form of description determines a specific form of program

organization. The transformation is nearly mechanical and helps the students focus

on the creative part of the task.

[[How to Design Programs]] is the text book authored by the core of the ProgramByDesign

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in Assembly, C, Java, ML, Python, and other programming languages, not to speak of

poetry, geometry, and biology courses. The fundamental idea of ProgramByDesign is to stress programming as a design activity.

This misconception is one of the reasons for the renaming actions taken in 2010.

To get started the ProgramByDesign project has produced three essential elements:

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==ProgramByDesign and Bootstrap==

In 2006 PLT at Northeastern University and [[Citizen_Schools|Citizen Schools]] from Boston made joint efforts to reach out to inner city students with after-school programs. Citizen Schools is a nation-wide organization that matches volunteers with after-school program sites and gets them started with scripted curricula. The goal of the effort is to translate the material into a sixth-grade curriculum. The first few tests were a great success in Boston.<ref>{{cite news

| url=http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/dorchester/2011/05/bootstrap_program_pulls_up_rox.html

| title=Bootstrap program pulls up Roxbury, Dorchester middle-schoolers