Programming for Everyone: A Visual Programming Toolkit

Abstract

Computer Programming is the backbone of the software industry. This industry is evolving and progressing minute by minute and is arguably one of the most important and impactful trends of the coming years. As the demand is growing day by day, the number of newcomers in this field are also growing rapidly. That is where the majority of the newcomers of the industry face their first problem, which is, that programming in the start is challenging to learn. The concepts, syntaxes and the general “flow” of the code are not easy to understand in the first few days. A lot of new students get discouraged from this thinking that this is too difficult of a subject or field for them to pursue while only a few stay consistent and come out as computer programmers. Even then there are a lot of students who are just average in computer programming while only a few are good. This led to the making of this framework which helps the “onboarding” process for the new commers and essentially aims to reduce the number of students who quit programming while also decreasing the time required by them to understanding the concepts of programming. This Thesis presents a framework that by utilizing the ease of Visual Programming Languages and the fine control of Textual Programming Languages an idea that will not only help newcomers in programming by making their environment less intimidating but also help them learn quicker as concepts are understood a lot better while presented visually. Both blocked-based programming and traditional textual programming concepts are used in this to help students, in the beginning, understand the structuring of how code works by showing them a general overview of the code and its syntax. Then slowly we move the student into textual programming by replacing blocks one by one to minimize the difficulty of learning all code at once and maximizing their understandability of the syntax as they do not have to learn all the programming concepts at once, which is how traditional teaching methods usually approach this. The results of the presented framework are very positive. The results are a combination of student feedback and student progression regarding computer programming. The sample space of the students consisted of 300 plus students in order to get conclusive results.