Trends in Functional Programming in Education (TFPIE)

Welcome! The 2024 edition of Trends in Functional Programming in Education will be held on January 9th in South Orange, New Jersey at Seton Hall University in the United States, together with TFP which will be held on January 10-12.

The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, teachers and professionals that use, or are interested in the use of, functional programming in education. TFPIE aims to be a venue where novel ideas, classroom-tested ideas and work-in-progress on the use of functional programming in education are discussed. The one-day workshop will foster a spirit of open discussion by having a review process for publication after the workshop. The program chair of TFPIE 2024 will screen submissions to ensure that all presentations are within scope and are of interest to participants. After the workshop, presenters will be invited to submit revised versions of their articles for publication in the journal Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS).

TFPIE workshops have previously been held in St Andrews, Scotland (2012), Provo Utah, USA (2013), Soesterberg, The Netherlands (2014), Sophia-Antipolis, France (2015), College Park, USA (2016), Canterbury, UK (2017), Gothenburg (2018) Vancouver (2019), Krakow, Poland (2020), online due to COVID-19 (2021, 2022, with some talks from TFPIE 2022 also presented in person at the Lambda Days in Krakow, Poland), and Boston, MA, USA (2023) (back in-person).

Topics

TFPIE 2024 welcomes submissions describing techniques used in the classroom, tools used in and/or developed for the classroom and any creative use of functional programming (FP) to aid education in or outside Computer Science. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

FP and beginning CS students
FP and Computational Thinking
FP and Artificial Intelligence
FP in Robotics
FP and Music
Advanced FP for undergraduates
FP in graduate education
Engaging students in research using FP
FP in Programming Languages
FP in the high school curriculum
FP as a stepping stone to other CS topics
FP and Philosophy
The pedagogy of teaching FP
FP and e-learning: MOOCs, automated assessment etc.
Best Lectures more details below

In addition to papers, we are requesting best lecture presentations. What’s your best lecture topic in an FP related course? Do you have a fun way to present FP concepts to novices or perhaps an especially interesting presentation of a difficult topic? In either case, please consider sharing it. Best lecture topics will be selected for presentation based on a short abstract describing the lecture and its interest to TFPIE attendees.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: December 26th 2023, Anywhere on Earth
Notification: by December 30th 2023 (Note: submissions will be evaluated on a rolling basis, so earlier submissions will receive an earlier response)
TFPIE Registration Deadline: TBA
Workshop: January 9th 2024
Submission for formal review: February 23, 2024, Anywhere on Earth.
Notification of full article: April 5, 2024
Camera ready: May 3, 2024

The Programme Committee

Stephen Chang (Chair) - UMass Boston, USA
John Clements - Cal Poly, USA
Youyou Cong - Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Christoph Lüth - University of Bremen, Germany
Simão Melo de Sousa - University of Algarve, Portugal
Vincent St-Amour - Northwestern University, USA

How To Submit

Potential presenters are invited to submit an extended abstract (4-6 pages) or a draft paper (up to 20 pages) in EPTCS style. The authors of accepted presentations will have their preprints and their slides made available on the workshop's website. Papers and abstracts can be submitted via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=tfpie24

After the workshop, presenters are invited to submit (a revised version of) their article for review. The PC will select the best articles for publication in the Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS). Articles rejected for presentation and extended abstracts will not be formally reviewed by the PC.

Invited Speaker

Jeremy Siek

Abstract

This talk is an introduction to the joys of teaching and learning about compilers using the incremental approach. The talk provides a sneak-preview of a compiler course based on the new textbooks from MIT Press, Essentials of Compilation: An Incremental Approach in Racket/Python. The course takes students on a journey through constructing their own compiler for a small but powerful language. The standard approach to describing and teaching compilers is to proceed one pass at a time, from the front to the back of the compiler. Unfortunately, that approach obfuscates how language features motivate design choices in a compiler. In this course we instead take an incremental approach in which we build a complete compiler every two weeks, starting with a small input language that includes only arithmetic and variables. We add new language features in subsequent iterations, extending the compiler as necessary. Students get immediate positive feedback as they see their compiler passing test cases and then learn important lessons regarding software engineering as they grow and refactor their compiler throughout the semester.

Jeremy is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. Jeremy’s interests include programming language design, type systems, mechanized theorem proving, and compilers.

How To Register

Registration includes attending both TFP and TFPIE and is done via TFP web page: https://trendsfp.github.io/register.html

Registration and attendance are mandatory for at least one author of every paper that is presented at the workshop.

Only papers that have been presented at TFPIE may be submitted to the post-reviewing process.

Program (Tue Jan 9th 2024)

Please attach your slides and a pdf of your pre-submission for the other participants to look at (or send them to: stephen.chang at umb dot edu).

The conference will take place on the Seton Hall University campus in McNulty Hall Auditorium, Room 101.

All participants are welcome to attend all TFP events, including the excursion and the dinner on Thu Jan 11th.

8:00 - 8:55 Breakfast

8:55 - 9:00 Welcome (Stephen Chang)

Keynote (chair: Stephen Chang)

9:00 - 10:00 Jeremy Siek Essentials of Compilation (remote)

10:00 - 10:30 Coffee Break

Presentation session 1 (chair: Stephen Chang)

10:30 - 11:00 Teaching Type Systems Implementation with Stella, an Extensible Statically Typed Programming Language Abdelrahman Abounegm, Nikolai Kudasov and Aleksei Stepanov - Innopolis University, Innopolis, Tatarstan Republic, Russia

11:00 - 11:30 Finite-State Automaton To/From Regular Expression Visualization Marco Morazan and Tijana Minić - Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA

11:30 - 13:30 Lunch

Presentation session 2 (chair: Jason Hemann)

13:30 - 14:00 Computation Graphs for State-Based Machines Marco Morazan and Oliwia Kempinski - Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA

14:00 - 14:30 Programming Language Case Studies Can Be Deep Rose Bohrer - Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, MA, USA

14:30 - 15:00 Coffee Break

Presentation session 3 (chair: Stephen Chang)

15:00 - 15:30 RegularIMP: an imperative calculus to describe regular languages Soroush Aghajani, Emma Kelminson and Tiago Cogumbreiro - UMass Boston, Boston, MA, USA