SCALES: Learning Multimedia in a Mixed-Paradigm (original) (raw)

Learning functional programming is difficult for beginning programmers, especially when the most common examples come from data structures such as lists and trees. We believe an environment that supports working with multimedia objects, such as graphics and music, will help a student learn functional programming in a more efficient and productive manner. For this reason, we have started development of a set of media libraries in the Scala programming language. Our plan is to create an integrated development environment built on Eclipse that provides access to these tools. In this paper, we explain the design of our libraries, which we have named the SCALES project, and show library functionality by providing examples of Sierpinski's Triangle, the Towers of Hanoi, and Frère Jacques.