A Support Environment for the Teaching of Programming

This thesis examines the effectiveness of a specially constructed computer based support environment for the teaching of computer programming to novice programmers. In order to achieve this, the following distinct activities were pursued. Firstly, an in-depth investigation of programming misconceptions and techniques used for overcoming them was carried out. Secondly, the educational principles gained from this investigation were used to design and implement a computer based environment to support novice programmers learning the Pascal language. Finally, several statistical methods were used to compare students who made use of the support environment to those who did not and the results are discussed