Effects of Code Representation on Student Perceptions and Attitudes Toward Programming

Hybrid and Non-Hybrid Block-Based Programming Languages in an Introductory College Computer-Science Course

“…That this hybrid BBL allows students to control their learning experience and choose their own level of support might serve to increase self-efficacy. Blanchard et al (2019) found that 8th graders who transitioned to the use of a hybrid language after using a BBL and before transitioning to a text-only environment had more positive perceptions about the text-based environment than their counterparts who either transitioned from the BBL directly to the text-only environment or worked in the text-only environment for the entire study period. Deng et al (2015), similarly, found that high school students who learned Pencil Code were more confident about programming than those who learned in a text-based environment.…”

“…The ability to view block commands in auto-generated code, and to edit that code, would seem to offer a smoother transition to text-based programming (Bau et al, 2017;Weintrop & Holbert, 2017). Two studies, one by Blanchard et al (2019) and the other by Alrubaye et al (2019), suggest that learning a hybrid language, for 8 th graders and undergraduates, respectively, can facilitate the subsequent learning of a simple text-based language. At the college level, Blanchard et al (2020) found that the use of a hybrid BBL in a CS1 course benefited students on course assessments of reading and writing Java code but not on a validated assessment of programming concepts, compared to students who received solely text-based instruction.…”