I am a Ph.D. student in computer science at WPI with Kathi Fisler. I work with the PLT research group on how to best teach programming. Specifically, I run experiments to inform the design of the curriculum and of its supporting crew, like DrRacket. I'm excited about the move to bring the material to middle schools. The argument is called Why Computer Science Doesn't Matter, and the project is called Bootstrap.

The short version of the argument is, since our curriculum is driven by the connection between programming and algebra, through programming algebra becomes the language of images, of animations, and of game design. It becomes a creative medium like Play-Doh.

For a brief moment I was teaching remedial math in a high school in Quebec, and before that I was teaching intro to programming at IIITM-K, in Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. And from 2002 to 2006 I was a grad student at Brown University where I did research on programming languages and type systems with Shriram Krishnamurthi.

I grew up a Montreal. I have a (rather thick) French-Québécois accent with a non-trivial Gaspé inclination, from my mother's side.

I created DivaScheme, which is both a semi-structured editing mode for DrRacket and an editor for people who are worried about developing RSI (or already have it.) In DivaScheme, editing commands are unchorded (no ctrl/shift/alt contortions,) and they work on whole expressions by default.

As part of an earlier research project, I built MzTake, a scripted debugger which uses the programming language FrTime to process events. FrTime is the work of my peer Greg Cooper. It is a programming language specialized in the processing of events, including the kind of events generated by a process running under the supervision of a debugger. Thanks to FrTime, within MzTake debugging scripts are concise and reusable.

I share some thoughts on a separate blog.

I post longer articles on their own page:

• Your wrists hurt, you must be a programmer (and here's what you need to know about RSI)
• An Emacs starter
• An introduction to Subversion
• And an (older) introduction to CVS

I am also on Twitter and (if you know me) on Facebook.

The pictures on this page were taken in Germany and Poland. I also have a flickr photostream with more photography on display, notably of Vietnam and India.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Error Messages Designed for Novice Programmers
Guillaume Marceau, Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi
Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), 2011, best paper award
[pdf]
(a preliminary version of this paper appeared in Scheme and Functional Programming 2010. [pdf])

Do Values Grow on Trees?: Expression Integrity in Functional Programming
Guillaume Marceau, Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi
SIGCSE International Computing Education Research Workshop, 2011
[pdf]

Mind Your Language: On Novices' Interactions with Error Messages
Guillaume Marceau, Kathi Fisler, Shriram Krishnamurthi
SPLASH/Onward!, 2011
[pdf]

The HAL Project -- Discovering local artists through Zeroconf
Pascal Charest, Michael Lenczner and Guillaume Marceau
Linux Journal, January 2007
[html]

The Case for Analysis Preserving Language Transformation
X. Zhang, L. Koved, M. Pistoia, S. Weber, T. Jaeger, G. Marceau
International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2006
[pdf]

The Design and Implementation of a Dataflow Language for Scriptable Debugging
G. Marceau, G. H. Cooper, J. P. Spiro, S. Krishnamurthi, S. P. Reiss
Automated Software Engineering Journal (ASE), 2006 (by invitation)
[info+pdf]

A Dataflow Language for Scriptable Debugging
G. Marceau, G. H. Cooper, S. Krishnamurthi, S. P. Reiss
IEEE International Symposium on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2004, award paper
[info+pdf]

Robotics-Based Location Sensing For Wireless Ethernet
A.M. Ladd, K.E. Bekris, G. Marceau, A. Rudys, D.S. Wallach, L.E. Kavraki
International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (Mobicom), 2002
[pdf]

Using Wireless Ethernet for Localization
A. Ladd, K. E. Bekris, G. Marceau, A. Rudys, L. E. Kavraki, D. S. Wallach
IEEE/RJS International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2002
[pdf]

Efficient Inference Of Static Types For Java Bytecode
Etienne M. Gagnon, Laurie J. Hendren, Guillaume Marceau
Static Analysis Symposium (SAS), 2000
[pdf]