Direct Manipulation versus Text-based Programming: An experiment report.

The standard approach to programming is to learn a programming language, write a program in a development environment, compile it, and run it to check how it works. Another approach is possible using direct manipulation programming. This approach makes it possible to directly manipulate the programming objects (variables, arrays, indices) to implement a given algorithm and to automatically produce the corresponding program. In this paper, we report on the results of an experiment that we performed to compare the standard approach with direct manipulation programming. The experiment was conducted with an audience of 54 beginner students divided into 2 groups. The first group programmed with Python Tutor and the second with AlgoTouch, a direct manipulation programming tool. In this article, we present the experience and detail the results obtained.