Introducing novices to programming: a review of teaching approaches and educational tools

Learning programming poses students with many difficulties. The extensive research that has been carried out in the last decades regarding novice programmers has shown that an important factor of these difficulties is the teaching approach used. This approach, know as the classic approach, is based on a general purpose programming language, a professional programming environment and a set of problems from the area of number and symbol processing. In this paper, we present the difficulties encountered by students when they are taught programming with the classic approach. The difficulties presented are general and are not related to the programming paradigm (procedural or object-oriented). Next we review the various approaches to teaching programming to novices and the educational tools that have been developed in their context.