Traditional approaches to programming education, as exemplified by the typical CS1/CS2 course sequence, have not taken advantage of the long record of psychological and experimental studies on the development of programming skills. These studies indicate a need for a new curricular strategy for developing programming skills and indicate that a cognitive approach would be a promising starting point. This paper first reviews the literature on studies of programming skills, cognition and learning, then within that context reports on a new formal structure, called an anchor graph, that supports curricular design and facilitates the setting of measurable milestones.
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Mead et al. (2006) studied this question.