SplashKit: a development framework for motivating and engaging students in introductory programming

Learning to program is known to be challenging for many students. Upon entry, students often have poor perceptions of their capabilities with some anxiety around the challenges they expect to face in learning to code. Lowering the barriers to entry will help ease students into programming and enable a broader range of student to continue programming. SplashKit is an educationally focused development framework designed to aid the teaching of programming by empowering students to create interesting and dynamic programs from their first programming tasks. This paper explores how SplashKit can be used in tertiary education to underpin a range of introductory programming approaches.