Programming environments for novices - lowering the barriers

http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan/uploads/37/novice-envs2.pdf
Programming Environments for Novices

Mark Guzdial
College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
guzdial@cc.gatech.edu
May 7, 2003


http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~caitlin/papers/NoviceProgSurvey.pdf
Lowering the Barriers to Programming: a
survey of programming environments and
languages for novice programmers

CAITLIN KELLEHER
Carnegie Mellon University
and
RANDY PAUSCH
Carnegie Mellon University

Since the early 1960's, researchers have built a number of programming languages and environments with the intention of making programming accessible to a larger number of people. This paper presents a taxonomy of languages and environments designed to make programming more accessible to novice programmers of all ages. The systems are organized by their primary goal, either to teach programming or to use programming to empower their users, and then by the authors’ approach to making learning to program easier for novice programmers. The paper explains all categories in the taxonomy, provides a brief description of the systems in each category, and suggests some avenues for future work in novice programming environments and languages. (...)

Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Usercentered design; Interaction styles; Theory and methods; K.3 [Computing Milieux]: Computers and Education General Terms: Design, Languages, Human Factors Additional Key Words and Phrases: Human-computer interaction, Computer Science education, literacy, learning, problem solving