From Mathematics to Software Engineering: Introducing Category Theory into the Computer Science Curriculum

摘要

Category theory, with its increasing role in computer science, has proved useful in the investigation of programming languages and other theoretical aspects of software engineering. As a bridge-building exercise, we introduce the category theory course into the computer science curriculum, the purpose of which includes building a unified framework to generalize the discrete structures of mathematical courses and providing an environment for formulating concepts of other software engineering courses. We develop a teaching schema, summarize our experiences, and give some suggestions for pedagogical techniques for the course.