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Evaluation of a Frame-based Programming Editor

Published: 25 August 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Frame-based editing is a novel way to edit programs, which claims to combine the benefits of textual and block-based programming. It combines structured `frames' of preformatted code, designed to reduce the burden of syntax, with `slots' that allow for efficient textual entry of expressions. We present an empirical evaluation of Stride, a frame-based language used in the Greenfoot IDE. We compare two groups of middle school students who worked on a short programming activity in Greenfoot, one using the original Java editor, and one using the Stride editor. We found that the two groups reported similarly low levels of frustration and high levels of satisfaction, but students using Stride progressed through the activity more quickly and completed more objectives. The Stride group also spent significantly less time making purely syntactic edits to their code and significantly less time with non-compilable code.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ICER '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
August 2016
310 pages
ISBN:9781450344494
DOI:10.1145/2960310
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 25 August 2016

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Author Tags

  1. evaluation
  2. frame-based editing
  3. greenfoot
  4. novice programming
  5. syntax

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ICER '16
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ICER '16: International Computing Education Research Conference
September 8 - 12, 2016
VIC, Melbourne, Australia

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ICER '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 26 of 102 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

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  • (2023)An eye tracking study assessing the impact of background styling in code editors on novice programmers’ code understandingProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600133(444-463)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2023)Accurate Estimation of Time-on-Task While ProgrammingProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569804(708-714)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
  • (2023)Scaffolding ProgressProceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3545945.3569723(556-562)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
  • (2022)Primary School Students Programming with Real-Time Environmental Sensor DataProceedings of the 24th Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3511861.3511871(85-94)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2022
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  • (2021)Portraits of Programmer Behavior in a Frame-Based LanguageProceedings of the 10th Computer Science Education Research Conference10.1145/3507923.3507933(49-56)Online publication date: 22-Nov-2021
  • (2021)A Frame of Mind: Frame-based vs. Text-based EditingProceedings of the 2021 Conference on United Kingdom & Ireland Computing Education Research10.1145/3481282.3481286(1-7)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2021
  • (2021)SQheLper: A block-based syntax support for SQL2021 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON46332.2021.9453897(478-481)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
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