Bachelor Thesis, Spring Semester 2022
Author: Daniel Nezamabadi
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Zhendong Su, Sverrir Thorgeirsson
Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich
Task description - Written report (pdf) - Slides (pdf, formatting broke during export)
Programming, especially functional programming, is considered to be difficult. One difficulty for beginner programmers is the syntax of “classical” programming languages. In this thesis, we develop a prototype of a visual programming environment based on Algot and the programming-by-demonstration paradigm combined with the style of functional programming to introduce beginner programmers to functional programming without them having to learn the syntax of a classical functional programming language. To evaluate our prototype, we conduct a qualitative study with two participants. Our results show that while the graphical user interface of the prototype requires more work, the prototype has the potential to become a valuable tool for introducing students to the key ideas of functional programming.
Run runner.py located in the code directory using Python:
python runner.py
Make sure that you have installed PyQt5 and are using Python 3.10 (or later).
The GUI is not really intuitive, nor is it documented. In case you are interested, please open an issue, in which case I will try to document the GUI to the best of my abilities.