What We Offer
Our project is being funded by the
National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, and
others. Using their support, we have developed a collection of
material to help teachers and students use our methodology. In
particular, we offer
Our programming environment, DrScheme, is the product of over ten
person-years of development. It was designed from the very start with
students in mind. In particular, it is
- pedagogic: it offers subsets of the language
that provide fewer advanced features and better error-checking to
counter typical student errors;
- gentle: errors are flagged as soon as they occur
(which is not the case in languages like Pascal or C++), and
students are shown the exact instruction that caused the error
(which is impossible to do in Pascal or C++);
- interactive: even the smallest expression can be
run immediately, encouraging students to experiment;
- completely graphical: students can even write
programs that manipulate pictures---these are no harder than
manipulating numbers or strings; and,
- portable: the same environment runs on Windows
95 and NT, the Macintosh and various flavors of Unix, so teachers no
longer have to choose between hardware platforms based on the
software they want to use; students with different computers at home
can still use the environment!
More information on DrScheme is available in a technical paper.
PLT /
scheme@cs.rice.edu
Last modified at 10:49:52 CST on Monday, November 10, 1997