I'm not sure what the proper didactic concept is to teach programming. I'd love to see some data, because my personal feelings probably aren't of much use. Blu

I'm not sure what the proper didactic concept is to teach programming. I'd love to see some data, because my personal feelings probably aren't of much use. BlueJ does have a number of concepts that can be useful in the beginning. The UML view of the classes is a nice way to connect something very abstract with the actual code. Scope highlighting is a great idea too - I tried teaching some people to code and scopes seem to be as difficult a concept as classes are. Having the IDE change based on some text you wrote is pretty good too - like seeing relationships form in the UML view, listing public members on classes and so on. The only problem I see is helping people move on from BlueJ. Some people who struggled a lot learning the basic concepts may feel like they finally managed to find a setup that "works" for them that's mostly based on a task-based understanding: "I click on the BlueJ icon on my desktop, I click here to create a new class, if something doesn't work I better delete everything and start again because I don't know where to go from there" Other IDEs aren't necessarily better! What does it actually do under the hood? How do I create a program that I can run outside of the IDE, not to mention on another person's computer? Maybe that's not the problem of an IDE, rather it's the teacher who needs to include that transition in their course. I remember how back in school/university that was hardly mentioned at all.