A Preview of Pencil Code: A Tool for Developing Mastery of Programming

Abstract

Pencil Code is an educational programming tool designed to help students overcome common obstacles to advancing to open-ended work with real world languages and libraries. It transitions from visual code to text code with a dual-mode block and text editor; it smooths the leap from guided to open-ended work by integrating tutorials with a general-purpose programming tool; and it bridges the gap from educational functions to standard APIs by including a turtle library that subclasses jQuery.