Design and evaluation of a scaffolded block-based learning environment for hierarchical data structures
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Feijoo-Garcia, Pedro Guillermo; Wang, Sishun; Cai, Ju; Polavarapu, Naga; Gardner-McCune, Christina; Ragan, Eric D.
- Source
- 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), 2019 IEEE Symposium on. :145-149 Oct, 2019
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Data visualization
Tools
Visualization
Programming profession
Binary search trees
CS Education
tools
block-based programming
data structures
visual languages
human-centric computing
- Language
- ISSN
- 1943-6106
This paper presents the design of Blocks4DS, a block-based environment for students to learn data structures. As a proof-of-concept, we designed custom blocks to allow students to build and visualize Binary Search Trees (BST). Blocks4DS is built on Blockly and uses vis.js to provide visualizations of the binary search tree and its operations. This paper describes the results from an initial evaluation of usability and student learning.