Preface

The Sixth International Workshops on Trends in Functional Programming in Education, TFPIE 2017, was held on 22 June 2017 at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK, and was co-located with TFP, the Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming.

Goal

The goal of TFPIE is to gather researchers, professors, teachers, and all professionals interested in functional programming in education. This includes the teaching of functional programming, but also the application of functional programming as a tool for teaching other topics, e.g. computational concepts, complexity, logic and reasoning, and even disciplines, e.g. philosophy or music. TFPIE is the heir of previous events, like Functional and Declarative Programming in Education (FDPE), to which it owes a great deal and from which it has borrowed experience and ideas.

Keynote

A particular topic of this year's TFPIE was that of MOOCs and other online learning and, as well as a session on this, we were delighted to welcome Heather Miller of EFPL and Northeastern University to give a keynote on this topic entitled Functional Programming for All! Scaling a MOOC for Students and Professionals Alike. Heather works on and around the Scala programming language and is Executive Director of the Scala Center.

MOOCs

Others with MOOC expertise included Yann Régis-Gianas and Benjamin Canou from the OCaml MOOC team, Jeremy Singer (Haskell), and Simon Thompson (Erlang), and together they participated in a panel session on the topic of MOOCs and teaching functional programming.

Submissions

TFPIE 2017 received seven submissions and had some 30 participants. All submissions were found to be sound and in scope by the PC Chair and invited to give a presentation. The post-workshop review process received six submissions, which were reviewed by the program committee, assuming scientific journal standards of publication. The four articles in this volume were selected for publication as the result of this process.

Programme

In addition to the work reported here, the workshop heard a lively and thought-provoking "Best Lecture" from Colin Runciman of the University of York on the topic of Purely Functional Queues, as well as presentations by Yann Régis-Gianas and Benjamin Canou on the OCaml MOOC, Hans-Wolfgang Loidl, Phil Barker and Sanusi Usman on Enhancing the Learning Experience on Programming-focused Courses via Electronic Assessment and Juan Carlos Saenz-Carrasco and Mike Stannett on Overcoming Non Distributivity: A Case Study in Functional Programming.

Two lightning talks were also offered, by Elena Machkasova on Clojurebridge: volunteer approach to increasing gender diversity and by Joanna Sharrad on Teaching Functional Programming should start earlier!. The slides for these and indeed all the presentations are available at the workshop website https://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/people/staff/sjt/TFPIE2017/.

Concluding remarks

Although the number of submitted papers was somewhat low, TFPIE 2017 was again another very interesting meeting in a series of successful workshops. As programme chair I am extremely grateful for the help of the TFP 2017 organisers Meng Wang and Scott Owens, as well as Elena Machkasova, who wrote up notes from the panel discussion. Finally, my deepest thanks must go to the members of the programme committee

• Dr Laura Castro, University of A Coruña
• Prof Ralf Lämmel, University of Koblenz-Landau
• Dr Elena Machkasova, University of Minnesota, Morris
• Prof Michel Mauny, Inria, Paris
• Dr Jeremy Singer, University of Glasgow

Simon Thompson
PC Chair, TFPIE 2017
School of Computing, University of Kent
s.j.thompson@kent.ac.uk