Course Design and Tool Development for Functional Programming Integrating with Program Verification: from the Perspective of the Interactive Theorem Prover

Functional programming, as a highly reliable programming paradigm, was once valued in the last century, but it was not popularized in education and practical applications. In recent years, due to the increase of security-critical information infrastructure and information systems, functional programming has been widely used in key areas by virtue of its advantages in program verification. There is an urgent need to provide students with a supportive learning environment, but the steep learning curve and immature ecosystem can present certain limitations and challenges for learning and practice of students. Combining functional programming languages with concrete tools is widely believed to allow for quick and practical learning, so we chose to utilize Interactive Theorem Provers (ITPs) to help students understand and apply functional programming. In this poster, we design a functional programming course and develop a tool FPAid to relieve the difficulty of getting started and improving teaching method. While students have a better comprehension of the teaching content, they can also use functional programming languages to solve problems with high quality.