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Franklin W. Olin, |
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Transterpreter: A Little Parallelism For Little Robots Matthew Jadud,
Ph.D., Computer Science, Presentation
Description: I want novice programmers to have
authentic programming experiences that are hands-on and, put simply, fun.
This is a tall order: I know from research that novices often struggle with
learning to program, regularly becoming hung up on errors that are
frustrating, and at worst drive the new programmer away from the keyboard
forever. If we want to introduce students to something that is actually
hard---say, programming a robot to handle multiple, complex sensory inputs
while safely wandering around their environment---these kinds of errors early
in the learning process are absolutely debilitating. In this talk, I'll
explore how this research into the behavior of novice programmers has helped inform
our ongoing work to provide students with engaging and realistic approaches
to programming robots that interact with the world around them. About the
Speaker: Before coming to Dr. Jadud's work
with concurrency spills over into robotic control, where he explores the
power of linguistic abstraction for developing parallel-safe embedded
systems. This manifests itself most directly through his contributions to the
Transterpreter project, a virtual machine for concurrent and parallel
programming languages. This work is motivated by his more fundamental
research interests regarding the behavior and practice of novice programmers
and their first experiences in learning to program. Dr. Jadud received
his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the |
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