There has been much research into programming environments for children, with Computer Scientists building many varied environments to support programming. There has also been much research into how to build environments to support collaborative learning. Despite these technical achievements, there has been a lack of investigation into the fundamental activities of programming. Similarly, there has been a surprising lack of empirical evaluation of computer supported collaboration on learning.
This is a talk of two halves. First we present a task based analysis of learner programmer environments. The decomposition shows us that many environments do not support all of the fundamental activities of programming well. Second we report on an empirical evaluation of computer supported collaborative learning. The evaluation found that collaboration can affect performance, but did not significantly effect learning. We will also talk about our on-going and future-work that integrates these areas.
If there is time I will give a live demo of a prototype programming environment.