Hi there! I am Felienne Hermans. I am full professor of Computer Science Education at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and I also work as a high-school CS teacher one day a week at Lyceum Kralingen in the Codasium program.
I am fascinated by the question of how we can teach everyone to program. In my PhD dissertation I studied how we can help people working with spreadsheets better, by repurposing methods from software engineering.
After my thesis, I switched my research focus to programming education. Based on my experiences in teaching programming to kids, I developed Hedy, a new programming language that makes it easier for kids to learn textual programming, and I wrote up all that I learned about learning and teaching in The Programmer’s Brain, published at Manning. In 2021, I was awarded the Dutch Prize for ICT research.
I also write a quarterly column for De Ingenieur, the magazine for professional engineers in the Netherlands, and I have a weekly column in BNR Zakendoen (a Dutch national radio station).
Links of interest:
The photo above is made by Joni Israeli.
