PL-detective: a system for teaching programming language concepts

Authors:
Amer Diwan;William M. Waite;Michele H. Jackson
Affiliations:
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado, Boulder, CO;University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
Venue:
Proceedings of the 35th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Year:
2004

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Abstract

The educational literature recognizes that people go through a number of stages in their intellectual development. During the first stage, called received knowledge or dualism, people expect knowledge to be handed to them by authority figures (thus "received") and think in terms of black and white (thus "dualism"). Our experience indicates that many computer science students are at this first stage of learning. To help students move beyond this stage, we describe a system and strategy, the PL-detective, to be used in a "concepts of programming languages" course. Assignments using this system directly confront students with the notion that there are often multiple equally good answers and that discussion with students (rather than asking the instructor) is an effective way of learning how to reason.