The effects of professional and pedagogical program development environments on novice programmer perceptions

Novice programmers generally have difficulty learning to program and one of the problems contributing towards this is the program development environment used at tertiary institutions. A number of pedagogical program development environments have been developed specifically for novice programmers, but these have not been compared experimentally with professional program development environments. A study was conducted that compared the perceptions of novice programmers using a representative professional program development environment to a pedagogical program development environment during an Introductory Programming module at a tertiary institution. It was found that the use of a pedagogical program development environment had a positive effect on the feelings of achievement and learning while learning to program, while the perceived ease of using the program development environment and the perceived difficulty of practical assignments were not affected. CATEGORIES AND SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS D.2.6 [Software Engineering]: Programming Environments – integrated environments; K.3.2 [Computers & Education]: Computer and Information Science Education – computer-science education, curriculum.