TITLE: Matthias Felleisen Wins the Karl Karlstrom Award
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 30, 2010  8:57 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Early today,
<A HREF="http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/">
   Shriram Krishnamurthi</A>
announced on the PLT Scheme mailing list that
<A HREF="http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/">
   Matthias Felleisen</A>
had won the
<A HREF="http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2089571&srt=all&aw=142&ao=KARLSTRM&yr=2009">
   Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award</A>.
The ACM presents this award annually

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
to an outstanding educator who is .. recognized for
advancing new teaching methodologies, or effecting new
curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science
and Engineering; or making a significant contribution
to the educational mission of the ACM.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

A short blurb in the official announcement touts
Felleisen "for his visionary and long-term contributions
to K-12 outreach programs, innovative textbooks, and
pedagogically motivated software".  Krishnamurthi, in
his message to the community borne out of Felleisen's
leadership and hard work, said it nicely:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Everyone on this list has been touched, directly or
indirectly, by Matthias Felleisen's intellectual
leadership: from his books to his software to his
overarching vision and singular execution, as well
as his demand that the rest of us live up to his
extraordinary standards.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

<A HREF="http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/prl/gallery/">
   <IMG SRC="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/people/matthias-felleisen.jpg"
        ALT="Matthias Felleisen"
        ALIGN="right"
        WIDTH="200"> </A>

As an occasional Scheme programmer and a teacher of
programmers, I have been touched by Felleisen's work
regularly over the last 20 years.  I first read "The
Little Lisper" long before I knew Matthias, and it
changed how I approached programming with inductive
data types.  I assign "The Little Schemer" as the
only textbook for my programming languages course,
which introduces and uses functional programming.  I
have always felt as if I could write my own materials
to teach functional programming and the languages
content of the course, but "The Little Schemer" is
a <EM>tour de force</EM> that I want my students to
read.  Of course, we also use Dr. Scheme and all of
its tools for writing Scheme programs, though we
barely scratch the surface of what it offers in our
one-semester course.

We have never used Felleisen's book "How to Design
Programs" in our introductory courses, but I consider
its careful approach to teaching software design one
of the most important intro CS innovations of the
last twenty years.  Back in the mid-1990s, when my
department was making one of its frequent changes to
the first-year curriculum, I called Matthias to ask
his advice.  Even after he learned that we were not
likely to adopt his curriculum, he chatted me for a
while and offered me pedagogical advice and even
strategic advice my making a case for a curriculum
based in a principle outside any given language.

That's one of the ironic things about Felleisen's
contribution:  He is most closely associated with
Scheme and tools built in and for Scheme, but his
<A HREF="http://www.teach-scheme.org/">
   TeachScheme!</A>
project is explicitly <B>not</B> about Scheme.  (The
"!" is even pronounced "not", a programming pun using
the standard C meaning of the symbol.)  TeachScheme!
uses Scheme as a tool for creating languages targeted
at novices who progress through levels of understanding
and complexity.  Just today in class, I talked with my
students about Scheme's mindset of bringing to
<B>users</B> of a language the same power available
to language <B>creators</B>.  This makes it an ideal
intellectual tool for implementing Felleisen's
curriculum, even as its relative lack of popularity
has almost certainly hindered adoption of the curriculum
more widely.

As my department has begun to reach out to engage K-12
students and teachers, I have come to appreciate just
how impressive the TeachScheme! outreach effort is.
This sort of engagement requires not only a zeal for
the content but also sustained labor.  Felleisen has
sustained both his zeal and his hard work, all the
while building a really impressive group of graduate
students and community supporters.  The grad students
all seem to earn their degrees, move on as faculty to
other schools, and yet remain a part of the effort.

Closer to my own work, I continue to think about the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.rice.edu/~cork/book/node33.html">
   design recipe</A>,
which is the backbone of the HtDP curriculum.  I
remain convinced that this idea is compatible with
the notion of elementary patterns, and that the design
recipe can be integrated with a pattern language of
novice programs harmoniously to create an even more
powerful model for teaching new programmers how to
design programs.

As Krishnamurthi wrote to the PLT Scheme developer
and user communities, Felleisen's energy and ideas
have enriched my work.  I'm happy to see the ACM
honor him for his efforts.
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