BFPG Meetup - April 2025 - IT Education in Qld + STLC
Join the BFPG Discord: https://discord.gg/yYz2d8w7FY
Agenda
18:00: Welcome and setup
Presentation #1: An overview of IT education in Queensland - Thea Koutsoukis
Presentation #2: Explicit Substitutions Part 1: STLC and Background - Donovan Crichton
20:00ish: Pack down, head to Criterion pub.
An overview of IT education in Queensland
IT education - whether that is teaching digital literacy or more traditional computer science skills - has changed a lot in Australia in the last 15 years. Each State has their own curriculum and subjects, and Queensland recently did a refresh of their entire senior system. We'll take a look at what is required to be taught from Prep - 12, along with what the reality of actually being in a QLD school is like.
Explicit Substitutions Part 1: STLC and Background
This talk is part 1 of 2 talks on extending lambda calculi with explicit substitutions.
This a beginner friendly talk that will introduce the mathematics behind the Simply Typed Lambda Calculus (STLC) extensions of which underpin the very foundations of all modern pure functional programming languages (ML, Haskell, Lean, etc). There is a large gap between the STLC on paper, and how it is usually implemented in practice. Explicit Substitutions give us a way to narrow this gap.
This talk will cover: BNF Grammars, Inference Rules, The STLC, Substitution, β-reduction, α-equivalence, De-Bruijn Indices, Explicit Substitutions, and finally extending a variant of the STLC with explicit substitutions in preparation for part 2, which will draw on these concepts as assumed background.