The Novice Programmer's "Device to Think with"

We present some ideas for course material for the introductory teaching of programming that are based on the principle of allowing the students to be the domain experts. The idea is that the students' familiarity with the domain of discourse will make course material more motivating, and that it will be more likely that they will be able to model the concepts and artifacts being discussed. This approach thereby seeks to scaffold the students' understanding of programming-related concepts. For reasons discussed in the paper, we have chosen mobile phone technology for this discussion, but there is no reason why the same principles should not be applied to other culturally-accessible domains.