Studies and proposals about initial programming learning

The difficulties many novices feel to learn programming are well known. They don´t seem directly related to the programming paradigm or language used. We present some studies and proposals that may give some contributions to help students and reduce their difficulties in programming learning. We think it is crucial to get an in depth knowledge about the main factors that cause this problem. As the problem is complex, we used a triangulation of methods on a series of studies that we have carried through in recent years. The idea was to accumulate evidence and compare it with results of other studies published in literature. We joined and compared multiple sources of data and collated the methods in order to corroborate some conclusions. From the drawn conclusions concerning the main difficulties, we propose a set of suitable educative practices that, in our perspective, can help students learn, minimizing their programming difficulties.