The paper proposes and reports on pototyping a work bench system for novice Prolog programmers which consists of a visually-structured interactive tracer and a prototype-based programming support. The tracer actually is a simulated interpreter in Prolog. It is interpreted by a Prolog interpreter being embedded with facilities interfacing programs in Prolog and the objects programmed in C. It displays, by way of these objects, the past, current and future goals, highlights variable sharing and value substitution, and marks the current goals and backtrack choice points. It is at user's will to let the tracer show and hide subgoals as well as to let it backtrack when it failed, step back for redoing or terminate tracing. The programming support module first provides the programmer with structural prototype patterns and the roles of the constituent functions. We developed a support system for the 2 types of recursive definitions. After having selected the prototype, the user is requested to specify the data types and the names of variables to be put in the arguments, which propagate through the structure. The support module then offers a menu of primitive or user-registered constituent functions as may be useful in processing and/or obtaining user-specified types of data. Thirdly the system lets the user express his/her intention by sample input-output data instances in his/her task goals. It makes the values propagate through the structures thus motivating the user to design the constituent functions. At the goal recursion point, the user is allowed to creep into examining the definitions of the reduced versions of the instances, helping the user find the condition with which the recursion terminates. Finally the module assists the user to convert the structural descriptions into Prolog programs.