Preserving non-programmers' motivation with error-prevention and debugging support tools

A significant challenge in teaching programming to disadvantaged populations is preserving learners' motivation and confidence. Because programming requires such a diverse set of skills and knowledge, the first steps in learning to program can be highly error-prone, and can quickly exhaust whatever attention learners are willing to give to a programming task. Our approach to preserving learners' motivation is to design highly integrated support tools to prevent the errors they would otherwise make. In this paper, the results of a recent study on programming errors are summarized, and many novel error-preventing tools are proposed.