Programming Environments for Novices

The task of specializing programming environments for novices begins with the recognition that programming is a hard skill to learn. The lack of student programming skill even after a year of undergraduate studies in computer science was noted and measured in the early 80’s [32] and again in this decade [20]. We know that students have problems with looping constructs [31], conditionals [8], and assembling programs out of base components [33]—and there are probably other factors, and interactions between these factors, too. What are the critical pieces? What pieces, if we “fixed” them (made them better for novice programmers), would make programming into a more manageable, learnable skill? If we developed a language that changed how conditionals work or loops, or make it easier to integrate components, would programming become easier? That’s the issue that developers of educational programming environments are asking. Each novice programming environment (or family of environments) is attempting to answer the question, “What makes programming hard?” Each answer to that question implies a family of environments that address the concern with a set of solutions. Each environment discussed in this chapter attempts to use several of these answers to make programming easier for novices. Obviously, there are a great many answers to the question “What makes programming hard?” For each answer, there are a great many potential environments that act upon that answer, and then there are a great many other potential environments that deal with multiple answers to that question. That’s not surprising, since it’s almost certainly true that there is no one correct answer to the question that applies to all people. Not all of these potential environments have been built and explored, however. The field of Computer Science Education Research is too new, and there are too few people doing work in this field. We are still in the stage of the field of identifying