Subsetting Language Elements in Programming Environments for Novice Students

摘要

This paper introduces the ongoing CS1 Sandbox project at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). The CS1 Sandbox is a C programming development environment geared towards novice programmers. What makes this effort unique is that the system permits course instructors to instantiate successive subsets of a programming language, which in turn can be propagated to a student's programming environment. This pedagogical sandbox allows students to concentrate on only those aspects of the language that that been introduced in their class and to obtain feedback relevant to limited syntactic and semantic capabilities. The entire system has been developed using the Java programming language (to widen its potential distribution) and is currently being tested in Virginia Tech's CS1 course for Computer Science majors. Upon final testing and further refinements, it is anticipated that the CS1 Sandbox will be deployed in conjunction with additional sections of the CS1 course in the Fall of 2002. The CS1 Sandbox project seeks to show that imposing language subset modifications to the student's programming environment and subsequent progression through subsets can improve student comprehension of programming and yield a more thorough understanding of a given programming language.