(later ProgramByDesign and eventually giving rise to the Bootstrap project [2]) with the goal of teaching program-design principles to beginners and to explore the use of Scheme to produce large systems.

As part of this effort, he authored How to Design Programs (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001) with Findler, Flatt, and Krishnamurthi.

[4] In 2010, he received the SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education from the ACM.

In 2012, he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award for "significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages"[5] including small-step operational semantics for control and state, mixin classes and mixin modules, a fully abstract semantics for Sequential PCF, web programming techniques, higher-order contracts with blame, and static typing for dynamic languages.

In 2018, Felleisen received the ACM SIGPLAN's Programming Languages Software Award (jointly with the rest of the Racket core team).