Chiodini, Luca Sorva, Juha Hauswirth, Matthias 2023 Many introductory programming courses employ graphics libraries that promote engagement and enable fun visuals. However, student excitement over graphical outputs is not a guarantee of conceptual understanding of programming, and graphics may even distract from intended learning outcomes. Our contribution is twofold. First, we analyze a selection of existing graphics libraries designed for novice programmers. We consider how these libraries foster clean decomposition, direct students’ attention to key content, and manage complexity; we find shortcomings in these respects. These shortcomings involve the libraries’ support for global coordinates and external graphics, as well as their rich APIs; we argue that these features, although powerful, are also potential pitfalls in student learning. Second, we present the design of a new graphics library, PyTamaro, which avoids the pitfalls with a minimalist design that eschews coordinates; we also outline a pedagogical approach that builds on PyTamaro’s strengths and deliberate limitations. We briefly discuss PyTamaro’s trade-offs in comparison to coordinate-based libraries. The work reported here paves the way for future empirical evaluations of PyTamaro and associated teaching practices. application/pdf https://n2t.net/ark:/12658/srd1334747 https://susi.usi.ch/global/documents/334747 https://susi.usi.ch/documents/334747/files/2023_SPLASHE-PyTamaro-CameraReady.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1145/3622780.3623644 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/ark/12658/srd1334747 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Rights reserved ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on SPLASH-E. - 2023 Education Graphics Library Visual Novices Programming Decomposition info:eu-repo/classification/udc/004 Teaching programming with graphics : pitfalls and a solution http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794