Tell Me What's Wrong: A Python IDE with Error Messages

Development environments play a crucial role for novice programmers. Not only do they act as interface to type in and execute programs, but a programming environment is also responsible for reporting errors, managing in- and output when the program is running, or offering the programmer access to the underlying notional machine. In recent years several new educational programming environments for Python have been presented. However, the important issue of reporting errors has rarely been addressed and evaluations often hint that students main issue is the poor quality of Python's error messages. We have therefore written an educational Python environment with enhanced error messages. This paper presents the design and rationale of its three primary features: modifications to Python, enhanced error messages, and the visual debugger.

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