The Calculator Project - Formal Reasoning about Programs

This paper describes The Calculator Project, which was a three-year joint research project between the Centre for Information Technology in Education at The Open University, U.K. (Pat Fung, Tim O’Shea) and the Department of Computer Science, QMW, University of London, U.K. (Richard Bornat, Doug Goldson, Mike Hopkins, Steve Reeves). The project was funded by the U.K. Joint Council Initiative in Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction. The central aim of the project was to test the hypothesis that providing so-called calculators would improve students’ performance in those parts of the undergraduate first-year that relied on formal reasoning skills.