Felienne Hermans is giving a keynote at Strange Loop 2019 on “How to teach programming (and other things).” She’s an associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science where she heads the Programming Education Research Lab (PERL) and focuses on the question how to best teach programming to kids and students.

Here’s the abstract for her keynote:

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.