10:57 p.m.
Dear all,
(This post should have gone out a bit sooner, but I got sick (nothing major). Thanks to an
extraordinary effort by several colleagues at USI, I received the go-ahead for this
announcement as a Christmas present! You won’t find that at any other university. That’s
one of those moments where I’m reminded how great it is to work at USI! Merry Christmas,
everyone!!!)
Dijkstra once said that “If Debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then
programming must be the process of putting them in.” – We all teach programming. How can
we teach programming in a way that reduces putting bugs in programs?
# Participate in Our Study over the Holidays
We would like to invite you to a study to shed some light on this! The study content is
different from last year’s, but the design is similar—you go through a survey that
includes quite a few questions and activities, and if you complete the process by the
deadline (January 11, 2026), you receive a CHF 150 voucher for SBB-CFF-FFS and hopefully
gain a few insights that you can use in your own teaching.
This study’s topic is Errors in Python. We expect it will take about the same time to work
through this study as it took last year: the average was about 1.5 hours. That is a
significant effort. You are welcome to split it into two ~45-minute sessions (part 1+2,
and later part 3), even on different days. However, you can only claim the reward if you
complete the entire survey.
A beneficial side-effect of your effort is that you also will go through a learning
experience that might serve as an inspiration for your own lessons.
To participate in this study, you must be an informatics teacher who is currently teaching
in a Swiss high school.
Note that the survey responses are completely anonymous. We will not know who answered
what. We will share the anonymous results after we analyze and publish them.
Once you receive the email with your personal link, it would be fantastic if you could
find some cozy place, grab a hot drink, and take the survey.
Oh, and if you have a colleague who is a practicing high school informatics teacher in
Switzerland, and who might be interested in participating (and in receiving a voucher!),
too, please direct them to this form so they can declare their interest:
https://usi.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b1p166a8890jKzs
We would like to have as large a pool of participants as possible.
# Currying for Mathematics
Now to something completely different: a little nugget connecting math and programming:
https://chk.me/DikgtLY
Even if this code does not make you giddy, I hope you can share a little bit of the sense
of joy I experience when encountering code that expresses concepts in other domains (here,
in math) in neat and concise ways using ideas from PL :-).
Happy Holidays!
Matthias and the LuCE team