Observations on the Design of Program Planning Notations for Students

In two recent projects we’ve tried to make progress on the long-dormant topic of teaching students how to plan programs. Concretely, we chose higher-order functions as our driving metaphor to address the problem of “What language shall we use to express plans?” We showed that this was a good medium for students. We also built some quite nice tool support atop Snap ! . Finally, we were making progress on this long open issue! Not so fast. We tried to replicate our previous finding with a new population of st