The difficulties teaching and learning computer programming have been a worldwide recurrent topic for the last twenty years. The community of computer science educators has proposed a vast number of approaches but, unfortunately, none of them has been truly effective. To the motivational issues suffered by the students, we have to add the absence of a serious study regarding the skills and abilities they have to develop, causing the organization of the programming courses reduced to a follow up of the syntax of a particular programming language. This article presents a new approach to tackle the problem; it is based on a solid conceptual framework and a novel pedagogical methodology, supported by a series of materials and tools that were built in the context of the Cupi2 project. We explain the main aspects of the proposed model focusing on four elements that we consider as fundamentals to the success of this work: incremental learning, problem-based learning, the use of computational tools to support the model and the teaching community we have built. At the end of the article, we summarize the major results obtained so far.
