Comparing feature assistance between programming environments and their "effect" on novice programmers

Authors:
Edward Dillon;Monica Anderson;Marcus Brown
Affiliations:
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL;University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL;University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
Venue:
Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Improving the novice's experience with learning to program has been an important research topic for some time. Appropriate programming environments for novices have been one research area. For example, many departments have adopted visual environments to teach programming as opposed to a command line environment at the beginning stages of a CS curriculum. Standard command line environments tend to possess less assistive features for programming than visual environments. In contrast, highly assistive visual environments could constrict a novice to learn a fixed set of foundational programming skills that exclude exposure to syntax checking, compilation and file systems. Therefore, novices may need to move to a less assistive environment to round out their skill set. A study was conducted in a CS1-laboratory class by examining three Python programming environments with varying levels of feature assistance (IDLE, PyScripter and Notepad). This study showed that students struggled with using a low assistive environment regardless of their prior experience and confidence with programming. Students were able to use moderately assistive environments more effectively.