Third Code NL Talk: Dr. Theodore Norvell

Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2014, 7-9 p.m.
EN-2043

Code NL is excited to announce our third talk and Q & A, featuring Dr. Theodore Norvell. Dr. Norvell will be discussing Kids, Programming, and Turtles.

Dr. Norvell started programming when the earth was young and mainframes ruled the land, and has paused only briefly since. His research is mostly about programming language design, compiling to hardware, detecting bugs in concurrent software, and program animation for teaching purposes.

He works as a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Memorial.

How do you make programming engaging and productive when you only have nine hours to teach it? For the past eleven years, I've been teaching grade 7, 8, and 9 students the basics of procedural programming in focussed, two-day courses. The topics include message sending, using variables, control constructs, procedural abstraction, and parameterization; the course even touches on concurrency. In order that the students can make progress quickly and to engage their imagination, we use a lot of scaffolding. Turtle World is a programming framework, written in Java supporting turtle graphics and interaction. It lets beginner programmers quickly see the results of their programming efforts. By the end of the two days, in addition to completing a number of challenge tasks, most students have built one or more simple programs -- often games.


Contact

Marketing & Communications

230 Elizabeth Ave, St. John's, NL, CANADA, A1B 3X9

Postal Address: P.O. Box 4200, St. John's, NL, CANADA, A1C 5S7

Tel: (709) 864-8000