Educational Programming Languages and Systems

Motivation

Programming languages and environments designed for educating beginners should be very different from those designed for professionals. Languages and environments for professionals are usually packed with complex powerful features, with a focus on productivity and flexibility. In contrast, those designed for beginners have quite different aims: to reduce complexity, surprise, and frustration.

Designing such languages and environments requires a mix of skills. Obviously, some knowledge of programming language issues (semantics and implementation) is essential. But the designer must also take into account human-factors aspects (in the syntax, development environment, error messages, and more), cognitive aspects (in picking features, reducing cognitive load, and staging learning), and educational aspects (making the language match the pedagogy). In short, the design process is a broad and interdisciplinary problem.

In this Dagstuhl Seminar we aim to bring together attendees with a wide variety of expertise in computer education, programming language design and human-computer interaction. Because of the diverse skills and experiences needed to create effective solutions, we believe that we will all be able to learn from each other about the challenges – and some of the solutions – that each discipline can provide.

Our aim is that attendees can come and tell others about their work and the interesting challenges that they face – and solutions that they have come up with. We hope to distill lessons from the differing experiences of the attendees, and record the challenges that we jointly face. The seminar will allow attendees to share details of their work with each other, followed by discussions, and finally some plenary sessions to summarize and record this shared knowledge.