An eye tracking study assessing the impact of background styling in code editors on novice programmers’ code understanding
Kang-il Park, Pierre Weill-Tessier, Neil C. C. Brown, Bonita Sharif, Nikolaj Jensen, Michael Kölling · 2023
Background and Context: The designers of programming editors aimed at learners have long experimented with different styles of code presentation. The idea of syntax highlighting – coloring specific words – is very old. More recently, some editors (including text-, frame- and block-based editors) have added forms of scope highlighting – colored rectangles to represent programming scope – but there have been few studies to investigate whether this is beneficial for novices when reading and understanding program code.