Assessing the Effectiveness of Emoticon-Like Scripting in Computer Programming

In this paper a new method is proposed for learning computer programming. This method utilizes a set of human-readable graphemes and tokens that interactively replace the grammatical tokens of programming languages, using a concept similar to emoticons in social media. The theoretical framework of the proposed method is discussed in detail and two implementations are presented for the programming language ECMAScript (JavaScript). The results from user testing with undergraduate students show that the proposed technique improves the student’s learning outcomes in terms of syntax recall and logic comprehension, in comparison to traditional source code editors.

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