Helping novice programmers bridge the conceptual gap

One of the main reasons why novices produce bugs and reach impasses while programming is the gap between concepts used in the daily world and those used in the programming world. How to understand novices´ mistakes and how to tutor them are very important for an intelligent tutoring system for novice programmers. Although a lot of effort has been devoted to the research on ITSs for novice programmers, less attention has been paid to the gap and few efforts have been made to understanding novices´ mistakes through the correlation between the daily world and the programming world. In this paper, the three-layered knowledge representation, such as the task model, the abstract model and the program model is described, through which, novices´ bugs and misconceptions are analyzed, paying a special attention to the gap mentioned above, and an approach to helping novices overcome the gap by appropriate tutoring strategies through the correlation between the programming world and the daily world is presented. Based on them, an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) which helps novices bridge the gap is proposed