SIGCSE 2005

I’m completely unable to sleep tonight. I tried between the hours of … two and five AM to no avail.

So, in better news, the paper “Towards concrete concurrency: occam-pi on the LEGO Mindstorms” was accepted at SIGCSE 2005. The pedagogic philosophy presented in the paper is in keeping with Teamstorms, a theory of instruction I developed while at Indiana. Unlike previous descriptions of this approach, I think it was stated as succinctly as possible in the paper: learning should be authentic, constructive, and fun. Clearly, the Papertian and constructivist influences here are strong.

The technology Christian and I have developed to support this philosophy is called the transterpreter. The transterpreter is a run-time for the LEGO Mindstorms that lets students easily develop concurrent programs in occam for small robotics platforms. Why is this significant? Little robots, while they seem to be toys, have real problems in the real world. Having a language that lets you say simple things about concurrency simply (and even reasonably complex things quite simply) is critical.

We are exploring using this technology with the students in the Cool Stuff in Computer Science group this year. This exploration takes us boldly (foolhardily?) into the unknown, both with the technology and with the pedagogy. So far it has proven to be exciting, and we hope that our approach and tools prove valuable to the students, enabling them to achieve creative feats that might have been unattainable otherwise.