Supporting Novice Programmers with Natural Language in the Early Stage of Programming

When Novice programmers are learning the basic constructs of programming, they often struggle with translating their mental abstraction into a computer solution. A partial reason for this difficulty is the contrast and distance between these two views. What might be the effect of adding a further onscreen representation of the solution based on more familiar elements? This research explores the usefulness of providing a second representation to support a visual programming language designed for novice programmers. In particular, the second representation uses Natural Language to describe the current solution. This paper describes an experiment that has compared the use of natural language as a secondary representation supporting a flowchart language with the use of pseudo-code as a secondary representation supporting the same flowchart language. The initial results based on learning gains derived from a pre- and post-test are reported.