Integrated Help

Abstract

Teaching computer programming to novice programmers is a challenging job. One possible reason for this is that novice programmers struggle to understand internal manipulation of key programming concepts which causes misconception and difficulties. An observation study was conducted to investigate misconceptions and difficulty experienced by Novice Programmers. Study revealed three major findings - firstly, novice programmers found textual presentation of programming concept to be monotonous; they preferred alternative presentation in the form of – text, audio, video, animation, simulation etc. Secondly, Ergonomics of learning interface causes eye fatigue. Thirdly, to remove misconception when novice programmers search WWW due to numerous search results they suffer from ‘lost-in-hyperspace’ problem.Further, exhaustive survey on existing integrated programming IDE (C, C++, Java Editor, .net Editor, SQL Server, Oracle) revealed integrated help provided by majority of them, suffers from key findings of observational study. To address this, “Integrated Help” content presentation model is proposed. A series of studies established this model to be potentially effective. Learning material facilitated through “Integrated Help” was found to interesting and engaging. As a result it proved to be an aid to novice programmers to develop better understanding of key concepts.