Teaching novices to program is an unsolved problem. One part of the problem lies in the fact that industrial languages are used for teaching novices, while they were not made for this purpose. I am designing a Programming Education Runtime System to easily create modular languages for education. This system utilizes object algebras, trampolining and algebraic effects and handlers. It has been used to implement an interpreter for the Hedy programming language. This implementation has several important advantages over the existing one, such as better debugging support and better integration with the Hedy platform.

I am a PhD student in Tom Schrijvers’ group at the KU Leuven and working closely with the research group of Felienne Hermans. I am working on improving programming education by allowing educators to tailor the programming language to the needs of their students and programming education researchers to the needs of their research goals..