[Haskell] How do students learn Haskell? Postgraduate project at University of Kent

[S.J.Thompson]

Funding is available for this postgraduate project, supervised by Simon
Thompson and Sally Fincher, in collaboration with Jurriaan Hage, Utrecht
University.

To apply visit http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/research/pg/


How do students learn Haskell?

As users and teachers of Haskell, we have some sense of how people, both
experienced programmers and novices, learn to program in Haskell. This
sense is based on experience - as learners ourselves, perhaps, or
through teaching.

We propose an alternative approach, based on the wealth of data
collected through the instrumented version of the Helium system for
Haskell [1].  This collects information of the programs compiled, the
errors they generate, and how learners use the system in fixing those
errors, and so we can see precisely the way that learners use these
tools while they are learning.

This is a joint project of the Functional Programming and Computing
Education groups at the University of Kent, and the Helium group at
Utrecht. The CompEd group has experience of working on this sort of
project [2], and the FP group has wide experience of teaching functional
languages, particularly Haskell [3].

[1] Helium    http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Helium
[2] ICER 2006 http://www.jadud.com/people/mcj/files/2006-icer-jadud.pdf
[3] Craft     http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/craft2e/