Strange Loop

2009 - 2023

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St. Louis, MO

How to teach programming (and other things)?

Everyone should learn programming, right? Yes! But how... Should we allow children to explore and learn about syntax on their own, or should we drill programming like we rote memorize the table of multiplication or German grammatical cases? Felienne's talk outlines this history of programming education and didactics beliefs in programming that lead to the prevalence of exploratory forms of teaching, starting with Papert's LOGO. She will then explore programming education in relation to mathematics and language education and explore how rote learning could look like for programming. Felienne will discuss her own research into misconceptions and code phonology as means to teach programming more effectively.

Felienne Hermans

Felienne Hermans

Leiden University

Felienne is associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University, where she heads the Programming Education Research Lab (PERL). Felienne's work focuses on the question how to best teach programming to kids and students, investigating misconceptions, didactic strategies and programming environments. Felienne is a co-editor of the ACM journal Transactions on Computing Education, and a host at the IEEE podcast SE Radio, one of the most popular software engineering podcasts on the web. She writes a monthly column for Dutch IT magazine AG Connect and she ran the Joy of Coding conference for 6 years. When she is not coding, blogging or teaching, she is probably knitting, running or playing a (board)game. Felienne blogs at felienne.com