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 article 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 each system’s authors ’ approach, to making learning to program easier for novice programmers. The article 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.

A programming system is the user interface between the programmer and the computer. Programming is a notoriously difficult activity, and some of this difficulty can be attributed to the user interface as opposed to other factors. Historically, the designs of programming languages and tools have not emphasized usability. This paper describes the process we used to design HANDS, a new programming system for children that focuses on usability, where HCI knowledge, principles, and methods guided all design decisions. The features of HANDS are presented along with their motivations from prior empirical research on programmers and new studies conducted by the authors. HANDS is an event-based language that features a concrete model for computation, provides operators that match the

Syntactically correct code does not fall from the sky; the process that leads to a student’s first executable program is not well understood. At the University of Kent we have begun to explore the compilation behaviours of novice programmers, or the behaviours that students exhibit while authoring code; in our initial study, we have focused on when and what they choose to compile. By examining these behaviours, we have determined the most common errors encountered by students using BlueJ in our introductory course on object-oriented programming, how those students tend to program when in supervised laboratory sessions, and we have identified future directions of study driven by our initial observations. Our goal is to apply this research to the future development of BlueJ and instructional methodologies involving its use in the classroom. 1.

a survey of programming environments and languages for novice programmers