The impact of structured editing on introductory computer science education: the results so far

Properly done, introductory computer science courses have great potential, both for preparing future computing professionals and for the broad goals of general education. Yet the performance all too often lags well behind the promise. Poor grades, high failure and drop out rates are all too common at both the collegiate and pre-collegiate levels. However the advent of seamless programming environments based on structure editing provides us with an opportunity to change the situation in fundamental ways. Initial studies show dramatic differences between students who do and do not use a structure editor based environment.