The e-Lite group will participate at the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) with a short research paper entitled "TextCode: A Tool to Support Problem Solving Among Novice Programmers." VL/HCC 2021 will be held virtually due to Covid-19 from 10-13 October 2021.

In this paper, TextCode is presented; an IDE specifically designed to support problem solving among novice programmers in an introductory university course. In TextCode, the graphical interface arrangement and the interaction design encourage the developers to follow a set of steps to reach the final solution. Namely, these steps refer to reading and understanding the programming problem statement before start coding, decomposing it down into subproblems, exploring alternative implementations for each subproblem, and arranging these implementations to build a general solution. We consider that providing a tool whose design emphasizes the problem-solving steps can raise metacognitive awareness among novices and help them implement a working solution.

Juan Pablo Sáenz will present the work on Wednesday, October 13, from 13:40 to 13:50 (Central Time [US & Canada]).

The presentation video can be found here.

Additional information:

• Paper at PORTO@IRIS
• Full conference program