This research seems very useful for the future of technical communication, especially as we consider the value of textual programming. I was wondering if you could say a little more about the methods and participants in the study. What was the context where they were taught these methods? Also, in terms of specifically the cognitive skills required, would you say that visual programming prepares students for the mental work of textual programming? Or is it that visual and textual programming are so distinct that students learn patterns with visual programming that do not apply (or do not apply as easily) to textual programming.
Thank you for this research! I enjoyed your use of a timeline with the icons to follow your process.
The centre name was kistnen mestree tamil benovelent society, a youth club in Mauritius.
20 Children were between 6-11 years old. Two children of 6 years old, one child of 7 years old, ten children of 8 years old, one child of 9 years old, five children of 10 years old and one child of 11 years old. They are all students who were already attending a primary school. They came to the centre as a hobby class.
We had only 10 laptops in the class. Due to the unavailability of 20 laptops, two sessions of 10 participants each, were carried out on a Sunday morning. The first session started at 9 am and ending at 10.30am. The second session starting at 10:30 am and ending at noon.
In each session, the 8 steps to follow for the L-Thinker model were written by the teacher on a blackboard, drawing the grid lines and L-Shape block of codes. The teacher used a projector to project her screen when she was typing the codes and executing the codes so that everybody in the class can see the execution part of the textual language.
After explaining the 8 steps with one question. The teacher expected the child to be able to repeat the same steps as she did to test the child’s understanding.
Instead of using the blackboard, each child will use his copy book to draw the grid lines and form the L-Shape. He will then use the keyboard of the laptop to type the codes and use the mousepad to execute the codes on the screen.
Four questions in all were presented to the children in the pre-assessment sessions.
B. Cognitive skills required
– Textual programming
a) For a child to follow the 8-steps instruction, a child needs sequential or procedural reasoning skills.
b) For a child to be able to draw vertical or horizontal lines, spatial reasoning skills are important.
c) For a child to be able to type text characters, literacy skills and logical skills are important whereby normal keyboard has uppercase letters and children need to understand their corresponding lowercase letters before typing on the keyboard, which require a cognitive load, making concrete abstraction skills.
d) Debugging skills- (logical skills)- when children are exposed to text characters, they will be bounded to create more grammatical errors and therefore learning more on how to rectify their mistakes.
– Visual programming
a) Sequential skills are important to learn to go through different steps
b) Spatial reasoning skills are important with visual objects.
c) Literacy is not important in visual programming as all the codes are hidden from the child. Hence, logical skills and abstraction skills in visual programming tools cannot be developed as much as in a textual environment. The child cannot play inside his mind about the uppercase letters or lowercase letters on a keyboard. He cannot develop his creativity skills as visual programming tools are limited by their visual features, whereas words or text characters can be manipulated or extended more easily.
d) In visual programming tools, children cannot debug their grammatical errors and cannot develop their logical skills as much as in a textual environment.
This is a representation of the skills developed in visual and textual tools. Consider the inner rectangle as a subset of the bigger rectangle.
Visual programming tools are important, but not a pre-requisite, to initiate programming for children who are scared of text characters and grammatical errors/logical errors. But a pedagogical framework needs also to include a textual environment to allow more flexibility, creativity, abstraction in learning progression because the end goal is to develop creativity skills.
Different children can solve the same problem with different solutions only if they are able to develop their creativity skills in their mind, that they will be able to develop different solutions for the same problem.
To answer the question, if visual programming prepares mental work for textual programming, yes it definitely will prepare the mental model of children who are scared of text characters. These children will be prepared to develop sequential and spatial reasoning skills. But they will not be able to develop abstraction, much logical and creativity skills as in a textual environment.
But visual programming skills are not a pre-requisites for children who are not scared of text characters because at the end, any child whether he is scared or not scared, will have to move to the textual environment to learn real programming concepts.
To understand why there is a difference between visual programming skills and textual programming skills, we can understand this from a brain anatomy perspective. Visual images are processed by the visual cortex and the language production happens in the broca’s brain region, two different parts of the brain. This theory can be supported by two studies:
1. Researchers at University of Passau found by using MRIs, that textual programming happens in the language production area of the brain, compared to other brain regions (Amirtha, 2014; Siegmund, et al., 2014).
2. Another study confirmed that blind people have limited information in their visual area and more information in their language production area. Although, the two regions are distinctive, studies with blinded people showed that although these people cannot see, when they are hearing words, the language production area is communicating with the visual area, producing some information in the visual brain area, which makes us to believe that visual programming tools definitely generate some information in the brain to enhance textual skills in the language production area (Welsh, 2011).
This seems like exciting and important research! I’d like to hear a bit more about visual programming vs. textual programming– can you give a little more background about those modes for someone who isn’t familiar with the nuances?
For example, your goal of your program is to have a login page that looks like the following.
Username:
Password:
Sign in (button)
you will have the text labels “Username” and “Password”. You will also have the input area for you to type the username and password. You will also have a button for you to click to be able to sign in to a portal.
In textual programming, you will write codes in HTML (a textual programming language) in a simple text editor like notepad itself.
In a visual programming, the child cannot use a simple notepad editor. The child will be presented with a dedicated software where pictures or diagrams will be presented to the child in the form of visual objects. For example, the child will be presented in a menu options with a picture “username” as label. The child will drag the pictorial “username” from the menu options and drop it in the coding area. He is not aware of any textual codes behind. He can see only the pictures. He will then drag the second picture for the “Password” from the menu list and drop in the coding area, forming a sequence in his coding area.
Hence, the limitation with visual programming is that, the child cannot change the wordings in the pictures, according to his preference. The word “Username” from the picture is pre-defined.
Extra information: In visual programming, a computer converts pictures to text characters and then converts the text characters to 0s and 1s. In a textual programming, a computer goes through only one step, compared to visual method in two steps. The computer converts the text characters to 0s and 1s. In terms of processing speed, a visual programming tool is heavily loaded and takes time for execution. Not everybody will have patience to learn with a slow environment when executing flow of logic.
At the end, a computer understands only a set of zero’s and one’s. Zero is like no electricity in the machine. One is like electricity being charged in the machine. We have only two choices to power up something. Either we turn the machine on (1) or we turn a machine off (0). So this is why any machine (i.e. a computer) can understand only a set of zero and ones.
So any programming language we use, either visual programming or textual programming, the machine will convert all the these languages to the zero and ones for its understanding.
ericastone
1 year ago
Hi Yeeshtdevisingh,
Thanks for sharing your work with the SIGDOC community!
As you note in your presentation, there’s a growing urgency to teach children of all ages about the language of computer programming. I enjoyed your presentation very much, but I’d like to hear more about your plans for future research. Near the end of your oral presentation (around 6:45), I heard you say something about researching how children can transition from Method 1 to ____ (something else). The recording cut off, and there isn’t a transcript available for me to read which word was missing here. Could you please tell us more about this method transition and how you plan to expand your research in the future? Also, I’d love to hear about how you would teach educators to replicate your process in K-12 classrooms.
A. future research
As it is a doctoral degree project, after the pre-assessment session, the L-Thinker model was experimented in 15 sessions with different question types by increasing level of difficulties. The data collection is in progress and this why it has not yet been published.
For example, session 1 consists of question like expecting the children to build a screen with the following two lines displayed:
This is
A dog
Session 2 questions were more difficult working their spatial reasoning skills. For example,
This
Is
A
Dog
At the end of all the sessions, the child can autonomously write his own poems or songs exploring his creativity skills.
For example, for mothers’ day, they were requested to display something for their parents.
a=”Happy Mother’s”
b=” day”
wscript.echo a&b
B. Transition methods ), I heard you say something about researching how children can transition from Method 1 to ____ (something else).
– My apology about that. What I meant is to transition from method 1 to method 2. Because 5 children could not work with method 2 because they did not have enough literacy skills at that age 6-8 years old.
My planning to tackle method 1, is to have a method which does not require these children to go through textual challenges, like using puzzles for them to build their blocks of codes without them needing to write with their pencils- Kind of a visual programming approach to allow the transition to take place.
C. teach educators to replicate your process in K-12 classrooms.
I was planning to publish all the different questions in a book so that educators around the world can replicate the steps within 15 sessions time, with their own twisted style. Hopefully in 2022 or 2023. There is no other way rather than sharing the knowledge to contribute to the world progress.
As a parent, I see the pressure already for younger children to “get into coding,” so this research is useful to begin to outline when/how to introduce these skills. One of the useful outcomes was that children younger than 8 struggled where their older peers did not as much–what cognitively or intellectually supported the older students, in addition to the abstraction level? Is it still useful to teach younger students, or should they wait until they are older to be introduced? How motivated/excited are younger students to learn these skills? (the other commenters also ask amazing questions, so I’m excited to learn more!)
A. what cognitively or intellectually supported the older students
To be able to work with textual programming languages, language acquisition is a major part. The more writing skills the child has acquired, the more he will be able to work with textual programming. He needs to understand the shape of each alphabetical letter, uppercase and lowercase letters.
A child between 6-8 years, their hands are small. Their motor skills at that age are not fully developed and writing may be an issue. Another issue, is spatial reasoning, when a teacher is writing on a blackboard which is on a vertical plane. The child on his table takes time to understand that he needs to write in his copy book which is in an horizontal plane on the table.
Children above 8 years old, had enough experiences at that age and can eventually understand quicker compared to younger children.
B. in addition to the abstraction level? Is it still useful to teach younger students, or should they wait until they are older to be introduced? Unfortunately, abstraction comes better after literacy and numeracy skills. For example, when a child of 5 years old is taught about numeracy, we need to give them concrete examples to make them understand about numbers (e.g., 1,2,3,4). We will show them one stick, 2 sticks, 3 sticks , 4 sticks so that they can relate the number 1,2,3,4 with number of sticks visually. After understanding that concrete example, that they will be independent on the “stick example”, becoming more abstract to them and can independently say loudly “1,2,3,4” without mentioning the stick example. Such exposure are important to build abstract skills. At a younger age, children are more visual with colors. Textual programming being introduced to younger children in a similar way to adult learning, will be challenging because children need to understand first how to use a keyboard with the appropriate uppercase and lowercase letters etc. Without linguistic classes, younger children cannot start with textual programming. But they can definitely start with visual programming tools, with dragging and dropping pictures on their screens to develop their sequential skills. At a later stage, they can move to the textual environment.
C. How motivated/excited are younger students to learn these skills? Children like coming to the programming classes. Parents shared with me that children prepare their bags 1 week before the session and awaiting for the session. Children like physical objects. Working with the computer is physically stimulated to them. What makes them more motivated is when they work faster than their peers, quite competitive. Those who are still struggling, do work with their peers to learn. Two children using same laptop to learn from each other and then they are asked to try separately.
This research seems very useful for the future of technical communication, especially as we consider the value of textual programming. I was wondering if you could say a little more about the methods and participants in the study. What was the context where they were taught these methods? Also, in terms of specifically the cognitive skills required, would you say that visual programming prepares students for the mental work of textual programming? Or is it that visual and textual programming are so distinct that students learn patterns with visual programming that do not apply (or do not apply as easily) to textual programming.
Thank you for this research! I enjoyed your use of a timeline with the icons to follow your process.
A. Participants. Methods and context
The centre name was kistnen mestree tamil benovelent society, a youth club in Mauritius.
20 Children were between 6-11 years old. Two children of 6 years old, one child of 7 years old, ten children of 8 years old, one child of 9 years old, five children of 10 years old and one child of 11 years old. They are all students who were already attending a primary school. They came to the centre as a hobby class.
We had only 10 laptops in the class. Due to the unavailability of 20 laptops, two sessions of 10 participants each, were carried out on a Sunday morning. The first session started at 9 am and ending at 10.30am. The second session starting at 10:30 am and ending at noon.
In each session, the 8 steps to follow for the L-Thinker model were written by the teacher on a blackboard, drawing the grid lines and L-Shape block of codes. The teacher used a projector to project her screen when she was typing the codes and executing the codes so that everybody in the class can see the execution part of the textual language.
After explaining the 8 steps with one question. The teacher expected the child to be able to repeat the same steps as she did to test the child’s understanding.
Instead of using the blackboard, each child will use his copy book to draw the grid lines and form the L-Shape. He will then use the keyboard of the laptop to type the codes and use the mousepad to execute the codes on the screen.
Four questions in all were presented to the children in the pre-assessment sessions.
B. Cognitive skills required
– Textual programming
a) For a child to follow the 8-steps instruction, a child needs sequential or procedural reasoning skills.
b) For a child to be able to draw vertical or horizontal lines, spatial reasoning skills are important.
c) For a child to be able to type text characters, literacy skills and logical skills are important whereby normal keyboard has uppercase letters and children need to understand their corresponding lowercase letters before typing on the keyboard, which require a cognitive load, making concrete abstraction skills.
d) Debugging skills- (logical skills)- when children are exposed to text characters, they will be bounded to create more grammatical errors and therefore learning more on how to rectify their mistakes.
– Visual programming
a) Sequential skills are important to learn to go through different steps
b) Spatial reasoning skills are important with visual objects.
c) Literacy is not important in visual programming as all the codes are hidden from the child. Hence, logical skills and abstraction skills in visual programming tools cannot be developed as much as in a textual environment. The child cannot play inside his mind about the uppercase letters or lowercase letters on a keyboard. He cannot develop his creativity skills as visual programming tools are limited by their visual features, whereas words or text characters can be manipulated or extended more easily.
d) In visual programming tools, children cannot debug their grammatical errors and cannot develop their logical skills as much as in a textual environment.
This is a representation of the skills developed in visual and textual tools. Consider the inner rectangle as a subset of the bigger rectangle.
__________________________________
|creativity, abstraction, logical |
| __________________________ |………………..textual tools
| | | |
| | sequential. Spatial |……………………. Visual tools
| |_________________________ | |
|________________________________ |
C. Visual programming v/s Textual programming
Visual programming tools are important, but not a pre-requisite, to initiate programming for children who are scared of text characters and grammatical errors/logical errors. But a pedagogical framework needs also to include a textual environment to allow more flexibility, creativity, abstraction in learning progression because the end goal is to develop creativity skills.
Different children can solve the same problem with different solutions only if they are able to develop their creativity skills in their mind, that they will be able to develop different solutions for the same problem.
To answer the question, if visual programming prepares mental work for textual programming, yes it definitely will prepare the mental model of children who are scared of text characters. These children will be prepared to develop sequential and spatial reasoning skills. But they will not be able to develop abstraction, much logical and creativity skills as in a textual environment.
But visual programming skills are not a pre-requisites for children who are not scared of text characters because at the end, any child whether he is scared or not scared, will have to move to the textual environment to learn real programming concepts.
To understand why there is a difference between visual programming skills and textual programming skills, we can understand this from a brain anatomy perspective. Visual images are processed by the visual cortex and the language production happens in the broca’s brain region, two different parts of the brain. This theory can be supported by two studies:
1. Researchers at University of Passau found by using MRIs, that textual programming happens in the language production area of the brain, compared to other brain regions (Amirtha, 2014; Siegmund, et al., 2014).
2. Another study confirmed that blind people have limited information in their visual area and more information in their language production area. Although, the two regions are distinctive, studies with blinded people showed that although these people cannot see, when they are hearing words, the language production area is communicating with the visual area, producing some information in the visual brain area, which makes us to believe that visual programming tools definitely generate some information in the brain to enhance textual skills in the language production area (Welsh, 2011).
References:Amirtha, T., 2014. This is your brain on code, according to functional MRI imaging, s.l.: https://www.fastcompany.com/3029364/this-is-your-brain-on-code-according-to-functional-mri-imaging.
Siegmund, J. et al., 2014. Understanding Understanding Source Code with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. ICSE.
Welsh, J., 2011. Trading Places: Blind People Use Visual Brain Region for Language. [Online]
Available at: https://www.livescience.com/13003-blindness-brain-language-110228.html
[Accessed 13 10 2021].
This seems like exciting and important research! I’d like to hear a bit more about visual programming vs. textual programming– can you give a little more background about those modes for someone who isn’t familiar with the nuances?
For example, your goal of your program is to have a login page that looks like the following.
Username:
Password:
Sign in (button)
you will have the text labels “Username” and “Password”. You will also have the input area for you to type the username and password. You will also have a button for you to click to be able to sign in to a portal.
In textual programming, you will write codes in HTML (a textual programming language) in a simple text editor like notepad itself.
Username: <input type=”text” id=”txt_username” />
Password: <input type=”text” id=”txt_password”/>
<input type=”submit”> Sign In </input>
In a visual programming, the child cannot use a simple notepad editor. The child will be presented with a dedicated software where pictures or diagrams will be presented to the child in the form of visual objects. For example, the child will be presented in a menu options with a picture “username” as label. The child will drag the pictorial “username” from the menu options and drop it in the coding area. He is not aware of any textual codes behind. He can see only the pictures. He will then drag the second picture for the “Password” from the menu list and drop in the coding area, forming a sequence in his coding area.
Hence, the limitation with visual programming is that, the child cannot change the wordings in the pictures, according to his preference. The word “Username” from the picture is pre-defined.
Extra information: In visual programming, a computer converts pictures to text characters and then converts the text characters to 0s and 1s. In a textual programming, a computer goes through only one step, compared to visual method in two steps. The computer converts the text characters to 0s and 1s. In terms of processing speed, a visual programming tool is heavily loaded and takes time for execution. Not everybody will have patience to learn with a slow environment when executing flow of logic.
At the end, a computer understands only a set of zero’s and one’s. Zero is like no electricity in the machine. One is like electricity being charged in the machine. We have only two choices to power up something. Either we turn the machine on (1) or we turn a machine off (0). So this is why any machine (i.e. a computer) can understand only a set of zero and ones.
So any programming language we use, either visual programming or textual programming, the machine will convert all the these languages to the zero and ones for its understanding.
Hi Yeeshtdevisingh,
Thanks for sharing your work with the SIGDOC community!
As you note in your presentation, there’s a growing urgency to teach children of all ages about the language of computer programming. I enjoyed your presentation very much, but I’d like to hear more about your plans for future research. Near the end of your oral presentation (around 6:45), I heard you say something about researching how children can transition from Method 1 to ____ (something else). The recording cut off, and there isn’t a transcript available for me to read which word was missing here. Could you please tell us more about this method transition and how you plan to expand your research in the future? Also, I’d love to hear about how you would teach educators to replicate your process in K-12 classrooms.
A. future research
As it is a doctoral degree project, after the pre-assessment session, the L-Thinker model was experimented in 15 sessions with different question types by increasing level of difficulties. The data collection is in progress and this why it has not yet been published.
For example, session 1 consists of question like expecting the children to build a screen with the following two lines displayed:
This is
A dog
Session 2 questions were more difficult working their spatial reasoning skills. For example,
This
Is
A
Dog
At the end of all the sessions, the child can autonomously write his own poems or songs exploring his creativity skills.
For example, for mothers’ day, they were requested to display something for their parents.
a=”Happy Mother’s”
b=” day”
wscript.echo a&b
B. Transition methods
), I heard you say something about researching how children can transition from Method 1 to ____ (something else).
– My apology about that. What I meant is to transition from method 1 to method 2. Because 5 children could not work with method 2 because they did not have enough literacy skills at that age 6-8 years old.
My planning to tackle method 1, is to have a method which does not require these children to go through textual challenges, like using puzzles for them to build their blocks of codes without them needing to write with their pencils- Kind of a visual programming approach to allow the transition to take place.
C. teach educators to replicate your process in K-12 classrooms.
I was planning to publish all the different questions in a book so that educators around the world can replicate the steps within 15 sessions time, with their own twisted style. Hopefully in 2022 or 2023. There is no other way rather than sharing the knowledge to contribute to the world progress.
Awesome! Thanks, Yeeshtdevisingh!
As a parent, I see the pressure already for younger children to “get into coding,” so this research is useful to begin to outline when/how to introduce these skills. One of the useful outcomes was that children younger than 8 struggled where their older peers did not as much–what cognitively or intellectually supported the older students, in addition to the abstraction level? Is it still useful to teach younger students, or should they wait until they are older to be introduced? How motivated/excited are younger students to learn these skills? (the other commenters also ask amazing questions, so I’m excited to learn more!)
A. what cognitively or intellectually supported the older students
To be able to work with textual programming languages, language acquisition is a major part. The more writing skills the child has acquired, the more he will be able to work with textual programming. He needs to understand the shape of each alphabetical letter, uppercase and lowercase letters.
A child between 6-8 years, their hands are small. Their motor skills at that age are not fully developed and writing may be an issue. Another issue, is spatial reasoning, when a teacher is writing on a blackboard which is on a vertical plane. The child on his table takes time to understand that he needs to write in his copy book which is in an horizontal plane on the table.
Children above 8 years old, had enough experiences at that age and can eventually understand quicker compared to younger children.
B. in addition to the abstraction level? Is it still useful to teach younger students, or should they wait until they are older to be introduced?
Unfortunately, abstraction comes better after literacy and numeracy skills. For example, when a child of 5 years old is taught about numeracy, we need to give them concrete examples to make them understand about numbers (e.g., 1,2,3,4). We will show them one stick, 2 sticks, 3 sticks , 4 sticks so that they can relate the number 1,2,3,4 with number of sticks visually. After understanding that concrete example, that they will be independent on the “stick example”, becoming more abstract to them and can independently say loudly “1,2,3,4” without mentioning the stick example. Such exposure are important to build abstract skills.
At a younger age, children are more visual with colors. Textual programming being introduced to younger children in a similar way to adult learning, will be challenging because children need to understand first how to use a keyboard with the appropriate uppercase and lowercase letters etc.
Without linguistic classes, younger children cannot start with textual programming.
But they can definitely start with visual programming tools, with dragging and dropping pictures on their screens to develop their sequential skills. At a later stage, they can move to the textual environment.
C. How motivated/excited are younger students to learn these skills?
Children like coming to the programming classes. Parents shared with me that children prepare their bags 1 week before the session and awaiting for the session. Children like physical objects. Working with the computer is physically stimulated to them.
What makes them more motivated is when they work faster than their peers, quite competitive.
Those who are still struggling, do work with their peers to learn. Two children using same laptop to learn from each other and then they are asked to try separately.
Thanks so much for your answers! That helps me understand your study even more.