CS Pedagogy Colloquium

— 4:30pm

Location:
ASA Conference Room 6115 - Gates & Hillman Centers

Speaker:
ILIANO CERVESATO, Professor of Computer Science
http://qatar.cmu.edu/iliano/

Providing students with submission-time support for testing their solution to programming tasks, if done carefully, enhances learning by boosting student confidence and by pinpointing logical errors while they are on task. The Autolab platform embeds such support, among other things, and has been deployed with good results in numerous courses, mostly courses that make use of an imperative programming language. Using Autolab with a strongly-typed functional programming language such Standard ML has proved to be extremely demanding on the course staff. In this talk, I will report on my experience doing so in 15-150 (Principles of Functional Programming), a course that makes a diverse use of SML. Specifically, I will describe the challenges to using Autolab for assessing SML code, I will discuss some infrastructure I developed to mitigate this effort, and expand on the resulting benefits and lessons learned. Faculty Host: Klaus Sutner