This article continues with the curriculum redeft- nition effort and focuses on concepts that should be taught in an introductory programming course. Textbooks used in introductory programming courses typically focus on the syntax and semantics of constructs in a language. New research with novice programmers, however, suggests that language This work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, under NSF Grants MDR-8470150, DPE-8470014, and IST-8505019

this article we focus on two common perceptions--what we will call folk wisdoms--about bugs: Just a few types of bugs can account for a majority of the mistakes in students' programs. Most bugs can be attributed to student misconceptions about language constructs