The Yale University Cognition and Programming Project

Work is currently in progress on the following projects: What do experts/novices know about programming. T1 The objective here is to develop a plan-based theory of programming knowledge and to test it empirically with novice and expert programmers. We are also using this theory to study the bugs and misconceptions of novice programmers. Cognitively appropriate programming language constructs.’ The design of programming languages has largely been determined by computatronal constraints. However, we have identified cases in which the underlying strategy required by a programming language construct is not the one people normally know or use, and we have shown empirically that they have significant difficulty in learning