Writing, reading, watching: a task-based analysis and review of learners' programming environments

Abstract

The paper identifies three fundamental learning activities in the development of literary skills-writing, reading, and watching and describes the potential benefits of supporting these activities when learning to program computers. We analyse the support for writing, reading and watching provided by current educational programming environments and show that no current systems offer comprehensive and integrated support for the three activities. In particular, support for watching the relationship between the program code and the resultant program behaviour is poor.