Novice Programming Environments

Marc Eisenstadt, Mark T. Keane, Tim Rajan

"This book, originally published in 1992, encapsulates ten years of research at the Open Universitys Human Cognition Research Laboratory. The research investigates the problems of novice programmers, and is strongly oriented toward the design and implementation of "programming environments" aimed at eliminating or easing novices problems. A range of languages is studied: Pascal, SOLO, Lisp, Prolog and "Knowledge Engineering Programming". The primary emphasis of the empirical studies is to gain some understanding of novices "mental models" of the inner workings of computers. Such (erroneous) models are constructed by novices in their own heads to account for the idiosyncrasies of particular programming languages. The primary emphasis of the implementations described in the book is the provision of "automatic debugging aids", i.e. artificial intelligence programs which can analyse...