A study to build a new Visual Programming system: Fixed or contextual menu?

Visual programming allows students to construct their algorithms using graphical elements, reducing some difficulties usually associated with textual coding, like syntactic errors and countless commands to memorize. There are some visual programming software available, such as iVProg. iVProg is free and open source tool, designed to help the teaching and learning of algorithms, especially in introductory programming courses. The current version is developed with HTML5 technologies, fully portable, with a lot of resources specially the automatic evaluation and its integration into Moodle. This paper presents a comparative study between two different user interface implementations for iVProg: context menu against fixed menu. Each interface have different ways to delivery the resources to users. Moreover, both of them use point-and-click mouse interaction in order to allow the user to develop algorithms. Usability tests were performed with undergraduate students to identify users’ awareness concerning their effort and performance while interacting with the system. Students enrolled in a summer introductory programming course were invited to participate of usability tests. The attendees were divided in two groups, one group started using the fixed menu and the other with context menu. In the second session, the groups inverted the utilized interface. The study analyzed different instruments: the mouse log, NASA-TLX workload perception data, also an unstructured interview, that was conducted in order to identify students’ perception about their experience with iVProg. When analyzed visually, logs of mouse clicks obtained in the introductory programming course showed that the construction of algebraic and logical expressions required a higher number of interactions in both interface versions. Although students found the fixed menu interface less mental demanding, the overall workload of the fixed menu interface was much higher when compared to the context menu. Moreover, the participants of the introductory programming course obtained better results, with grades higher than class average.