Combining Tiled and Textual Views of Code

Abstract

Jigsaw puzzle programming environments manipulate programs primarily by drag-and-drop. Generally these environments are based on their own special-purpose languages, meaning students must move on to another language as their programs grow. Tiled Grace is a tile-based editor for Grace, an educational programming language with a conventional textual syntax. Using Tiled Grace, programmers can move seamlessly between visualising their programs as tiles or source code, editing their programs via tiles or text, and continue on to traditional textual environments, all within the same programming language. We conducted a user experiment with Tiled Grace, and present the results of that experiment showing that users find dual views helpful.