The Development and Assessment of a State-of-the-Art Integrated Programming Environment for Computer Science Instruction

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How to effectively teach computer programming is a national problem facing many schools today. Considerable progress has been made in recent years in developing integrated programming environments that combine under a single uniform user interface the functionality of traditionally separate tools for the editing, translation, testing and execution of high level code. Both the integrated nature of such environments and their "knowledge" of high level language rules relieve students from needless attention to what fundamentally are extraneous details. Hence the students are freed to concentrate on the essentials of problem decomposition and program structure and better understand the fundamentals of programming. Previous work has produced the necessary mechanisms for several key features of a state-of-the-art structure editing environment. The current aim of this project is to develop a powerful, integrated system that will significantly improve the quality of computer science instruction and make it widely available at minimal cost. The system will include the innovative use of flexible program visualizations to aid the programmer in mapping visual representation to code. It will include an Intelligent Computer-Assisted-Instruction (ICAI) system capable of individualized tutoring on high level aspects of procedural and data abstraction. An integral part of this project will be the systematic evaluation of the system in a variety of middle school and high school settings.