[Haskell & FP in Education] Welcome and introductions

[Stuart A. Kurtz]

Dear Haskell Education List,

I've been teaching a first quarter honors introductory programming class in Haskell to University of Chicago undergraduates for a decade. We're currently running 2 sections of around 40, where I'm teaching
one section, and my colleague Ravi Chugh is teaching the other.

A few years back, Jakub Tucholsky and I co-taught an upper-level undergraduate course, "Functional Systems in Haskell," based loosely on a Stanford course of the same name. In recent years, material Jakub and I developed for the Functional Systems course has been working its way into the introductory course.

I teach the intro course in Haskell because the usual way of teaching introductory programming at the University level, in which students who learned to program in high school are bored and get A's, and students who didn't are overwhelmed and get C's, strikes me as both uninteresting and deeply inequitable. In the honors sequence, I get a class with unusual characteristics -- half or more took a high school programming class (usually Java), the remainder are mostly mathematics or physics undergraduates who have an unusually high tolerance for abstraction, and often significant advanced mathematics. Haskell seemed like a natural choice: the students who didn't have programming before had something important to bring to the table, which encouraged "mixed" study groups.

We have very detailed lecture notes (sometimes paired, where Ravi wants to handle something differently from me):

	http://cmsc-16100.cs.uchicago.edu/2018-autumn/

The class has necessarily evolved with the language, and my sense is that Ravi and I will be doing a larger than usual set of revisions before the 2019 offering.

I'd value feedback.

Peace,

Stu

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Stuart A. Kurtz
Professor, Department of Computer Science and the College
Master, Physical Sciences Collegiate Division
The University of Chicago