This is an essay by the creator/author of How To Design Programs (currently at Northeastern) that lays out the pedagogy well: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matth

This is an essay by the creator/author of How To Design Programs (currently at Northeastern) that lays out the pedagogy well: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Developers.html http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Thoughts/Developing_Dev... The speaker in the talk linked is a previous Ph.D. student of the author above. Northeastern, Brown, Northwestern, and Waterloo all use the approach in HTDP as far as I'm aware, even if they don't use the book itself. Racket just happens to be the language of choice (or rather X Student Languages are, not even Racket) because they fit the pedagogy well.