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 survey of programming environments and languages for novice programmers

Abstract. The rising popularity of digital table surfaces has spawned considerable interest in new interaction techniques. Most interactions fall into one of two modalities: 1) direct touch and multi-touch (by hand and by tangibles) directly on the surface, and 2) hand gestures above the surface. The limitation is that these two modalities ignore the rich interaction space between them. To move beyond this limitation, we first contribute a unification of these discrete interaction modalities called the continuous interaction space. The idea is that many interaction techniques can be developed that go beyond these two modalities, where they can leverage the space between them. That is, we believe that the underlying system should treat the space on and above the surface as a continuum, where a person can use touch, gestures, and tangibles anywhere in the space and naturally move between them. Our second contribution illustrates this, where we introduce a variety of interaction categories that exploit the space between these modalities. For example, with

"The direct manipulation" has already become a popular keyword in the field of visual programming. In many visual programming system(VPS), the user can manipulate the program from its visual expression in the editor subsystem. But the execution process is still displayed in another window and user have to move the mouse cursor frequently. So we noticed the importance of the manipulation interface where user can do neccessary operations for programming in one field. We have implemented a prototype of such VPS using the IntelligentPad architecture. The elements of the data/program structures are expressed as pads. When user manipulate them, the program is also changed and is automatically evaluated. 1 Introduction Visual programming system(VPS) is the environment that visualizes the model of programs in two(or more)- dimentional forms with visual expressions such as pictures or animations[5][8]. VPS converts the data elements into pictorial ones, language model such as data structures o...

This paper identifies three fundamental learning activities in the development of literary skills---writing, reading, and watching---and describes the potential benefits of supporting these activities when learning to program computers. We analyse the support for writing, reading and watching provided by current educational programming environments and show that no current systems o#er comprehensive and integrated support for the three activities. In particular, support for watching the relationship between the program code and the resultant program behaviour is poor. 1 Introduction The ability to use computers is rapidly becoming an essential skill for everyday life. The ability to program computers, however, remains largely in the hands of highly trained professionals. The disparity between normal use and programming is changing, and the rate of change is likely to increase as users' needs and capabilities demand more from their computing environments. Already many home appliances,...

Many researchers have developed many programming environments for children. Typically each of these environments contains its own programming notation ranging from computer code to animated virtual 3D robots and in some case the notation consists of physical objects. While some of these notations were created by examining how children naturally describe computer programs, little research has examined how children understand programs written using these notations. Even less research has examined how children understand programs written using multiple notations.

In order to create Web-enabled applications that programmatically use the Web as an expressive medium, the current choice is largely between conventional programming languages that are difficult to learn and use -- and less expressive alternatives. In order to address this issue, we have been developing CrawLogo, a Logo-inspired programming environment in which Web-elements are programmable, body-syntonic "Crawltures" that exist within a 5-dimensional Crawlture Geometry. In this paper we briefly summarize related work, describe the CrawLogo environment, some sample applications, and the initial response of end-user programmers who have successfully used it to build Web-enabled applications. We conclude with a discussion of some insights into the larger question of empowering end-user programming of the Web, the development of a Crawlture Geometry, and future research challenges.