Aiding the Transition from Novice to Traditional Programming Environments

Abstract

Novice programming environments are increasingly popular as introductory tools for teaching programming. Many of these tools differ significantly from traditional programming environments and are successful in motivating novices and making it simple to start programming. However, it has been reported that students still struggle when transitioning to general-purpose languages and have difficulties learning certain concepts. In this paper, we briefly describe some of the problems novices have when learning to program and identify drawbacks to existing novice programming environments. We then present two different works in progress with features designed to keep some of the advantages of current novice programming environments but in such a way that students are led to deeper concepts. Such features include immediate feedback, loop construction, and automated identifier updating. This report references the feasibility of these approaches.