PL-detective: A system for teaching programming language concepts

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 they can create knowledge via interactions with the PL-Detective and that discussion with students (rather than asking the instructor) is an effective way of learning how to reason. We present experimental results that show that the PL-Detective is effective in helping students move beyond the stage of received knowledge.