An environment to improve programming education

Computer Programming learning is a difficult process. Experience has demonstrated that many students find difficult to use programming languages to write programs to solve problems. Student failure and commonly expressed difficulties in programming disciplines suggest that traditional teaching approaches and study methods are not the most suitable for many students. There are several reasons that cause this learning problem, such as the lack of problem solving abilities that many students show. They don't know how to create algorithms, mainly because they don't know how to solve common problems. In this paper we describe several educational computer tools used successfully to support programming learning and we present a proposal for another computational system that may help reducing current problems.

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