Programming Environments for Novices
2005
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 noted and measured in the early 80’s (Soloway, Ehrlich, Bonar, & Greenspan, 1982) and again in this decade (McCracken, Almstrum, Diaz, Guzdial, Hagan, Kolikant, Lazer, Thomas, Utting, & Wilusz 2001). We know that students have problems with looping constructs (Soloway, Bonar, & Ehrlich, 1983), conditionals (Green, 1977), and assembling programs out of base components (Spohrer & Soloway, 1985)—and there are probably other factors, and interactions between these factors, too.