Supporting Programming and Learning-to-Program with an IntegratedCAD and Scaffolding Workbench*.

Programming is a complex cognitive task for students, because of thedifficulty of finding the appropriate elements (the “decomposition”problem) and integrating them correctly into a whole (the “composition”problem). Programming is also hard to learn, because so much of the thinkingbehind a program is implicit and the process of programming is long and complicated.Our approach is to integrate a computer-aided design tool (CAD) with scaffoldingto create a single, cohesive, and coherent workbench for the entire process.Our workbench is called the GPCeditor. We have evaluated its use by high-schoolstudents. Our results suggest that students program well in the GPCeditor,they learn good programming practices, and that the learning is occurringthrough use of the GPCeditor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]