Beginning programmers are best served by integrateddevelopment environments that adapt to their growingsophistication as programmers. To this end, we propose fourdesign goals for learning curve management in educationalprogramming environments. We provide pedagogicaljustification for each goal, describe possible supporting featuresets, and discuss the extent to which these goals have beenachieved in some current environments, particularly JPie, ourinteractive environment for live construction of Java applications