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 measured in the early 80’s [1] and again in this decade [2]. We know that students have problems with looping constructs [3], conditionals [4], and assembling programs out of base components [5]. Are these the critical pieces? 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. 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—which makes sense, since it’s almost certainly true that there is no one correct answer to that 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 potential answers to key questions—indeed, even figuring out what the key questions are! There are many novice programming environments that have been built, and not all can be discussed in a short primer. Instead, this chapter will focus on three families