ICONIC programming in BACCII vs. textual programming

Abstract

This paper presents the empirical testing results on students' learning in the CS1 PASCAL programming course. This research is the continuation of a project begun in 1990. In 1991, creation of a prototype Windows based application for Personal Computers reached completion. That system, called BACCII, is used to teach beginning procedural programming. All but the most basic operations are accomplished using icons. When the algorithm is complete, the student can generate syntactically correct source code for PASCAL, C, FORTRAN, or BASIC. The system was evaluated with 126 college students in the Spring 1993 semester, randomly assigned to laboratory sections. Fifty-two used BACCII and VAX with the remaining 74 using VAX PASCAL alone. The results showed significant improvement in academic scores (and presumably learning) for the BACCII control group.