A design and evaluation framework for visual programming codes
Theodoros Karvounidis, Ioannis Argyriou, Αναστάσιος Λαδιάς, Christos Douligeris · 2017
This paper aims to investigate, classify and establish appropriate benchmarks for visual programming codes. For the present study we have relied on the use of the Scratch-2 visual programming language. Scratch-2 is very popular as an introductory programming language at primary education and at the first years of secondary education in Greece. Initially, an evaluation framework, named VPLEF (Visual Programming Languages Evaluation Framework), is constructed based on several selected criteria. Since the observation of the visual code is not easy in the programming environment, we adopted the codOrama tool for a more consistent representation of the Sctrach-2 codes, aiming to identify the code characteristics, which were then associated with the evaluation criteria. We focuson the evaluation criteria of user interactivity, communication and parallelism-linearity of VPLEF and on two groups of commands, namely on “Control” and Event”, in conjunction with the system arguments. The study of the aforementioned entities leads us to a set of specified relationships of each of these three criteria with the command/argument combinations. Finally, an evaluation process is proposed to quantify the contribution of each combination to a specific criterion.