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

如何有效地教授计算机编程是当今许多学校面临的全国性问题。近年来，在开发集成编程环境方面取得了相当大的进展，所述集成编程环境在单个统一用户界面下结合了用于高级代码的编辑、翻译、测试和执行的传统分离工具的功能。这种环境的整体性和他们对高级语言规则的“知识”都将学生从根本上无关的细节中解脱出来。因此，学生可以自由地专注于问题分解和程序结构的要点，并更好地理解编程的基本原理。以前的工作已经为最先进的结构编辑环境的几个关键特征提供了必要的机制。该项目目前的目标是开发一个强大的、集成的系统，以显著提高计算机科学教学的质量，并以最低的成本广泛提供。该系统将包括灵活的程序可视化的创新使用，以帮助程序员将视觉表示法映射到代码。它将包括一个智能计算机辅助教学(ICAI)系统，能够在程序和数据抽象的高水平方面进行个性化辅导。该项目的一个组成部分将是在各种初中和高中环境中对该系统进行系统评估。

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.