The principles of programming language design for learning and teaching have been described and discussed for several decades. Most influential was the work of Niklaus Wirth, describing principles such as simplicity, modularity, orthogonality, and readability. So why is this still an area of fundamental disagreement among educators? Why can…

This autoethnographic paper is part of a special issue trying to answer the question "How to design or choose languages for programming novices?" I will describe how my programming language Hedy was created, how the initial design goals were formed, how my perspectives on learning and teaching changed along the way, and how Hedy changed…

Block-based visual programming tools, such as Scratch, Alice, and MIT App Inventor, provide an intuitive and easy-to-use editing interface through which to promote programming learning for novice students of various ages. However, very little attention has been paid to investigating these tools' overall effects on students' academic achievement…

Research on the effectiveness of introductory programming environments often relies on post-test measures and attitudinal surveys to support its claims; but such instruments lack the ability to identify any explanatory mechanisms that can account for the results. This paper reports on a study designed to address this issue. Using Noss and Hoyles'…

Many have suggested that tinkering plays a critical role in novices learning to program, and recent work in learning analytics (Baker & Yacef, 2009 Blikstein, 2011) allows us to describe new relationships in the process. Using learning analytics, we explore how students progress from exploration, through tinkering, to refinement, a pathway…

The TeachScheme! Project aims to reform three aspects of introductory programming courses in secondary schools. First, we use a design method that asks students to develop programs in a stepwise fashion such that each step produces a well-specified intermediate product. Second, we use an entire series of sublanguages, not just one. Each element of…