cognitive psychology. PhD 
@wcrichton Have you come across: https://twitter.com/RolfRolles/status/968365884401160193 …? What do yo think of such discrete + finite games as a teaching tool for operational/denotational/abstract semantics?
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My criticism of the chess example is that there's a *huge* number of concepts. At the end, it's not clear what the reader should do with them. Most people don't want to memorize definitions. Tying concepts to tasks at each level will promote interest, retention, transfer, etc.
For PL, when I introduce a new concept like let-bindings, we look at: * How let-bindings are equivalent to function application * How lets compare to variables in other languages * Examples of both correct and incorrect semantics + how to use type safety to provably distinguish