Analyzing the influence of block highlighting on beginning programmers' reading behavior using eye tracking
Renske Talsma, Erik Barendsen, Sjaak Smetsers · 2020
To improve programming education, it is worthwhile to investigate how understanding of source code takes place. Reading is a foundational skill essential to tracing, debugging and understanding code. As readers' working memory is limited, their proficiency strongly relies on the ability to chunk and organize source code material. There are several alternative visual representations aiming to facilitate code reading, of which syntax highlighting is the most common. We hypothesized that highlighting code blocks in the style of the language Stride would scaffold students' reading process more effectively.