Research has been undertaken to answer the following question: Can icon-based programming languages be used to teach first year programming concepts to undergraduate students more effectively than text-based languages? BACCII++ is an iconic environment developed at Texas Tech University for teaching procedural and object-oriented programming concepts and languages. Course materials were developed and used under experimental conditions during the 1995-96 school year at Texas Tech University, with half using BACCIIH to generate C-H-code, and the other half using only C-i+. For each course in each semester the experiment was run, the sections using BACCIItl-did significantly better in overall performance In recent years, additional research has supplied object-oriented extensions to BACCII for use in the data structures/object-oriented programming (CS2) course, resulting in BACCII++ [5]. More recent research concerns the development of a complete set of course materials for the use of BACCII++ in teaching both CSl and CS2 using C++. Lecture notes, text, and lab manuals were developed. A successful experiment using those materials was run at Texas Tech University during the 1995-96 school year'. It is this recent experiment which is the focus of this paper.
Research has been undertaken to answer the following question:
Can icon-based programming languages be used to teach first year programming concepts to undergraduate students more effectively than text-based languages?
BACCII++ is an iconic environment developed at Texas Tech University for teaching procedural and object-oriented programming concepts and languages. Course materials were developed and used under experimental conditions during the 1995-96 school year at Texas Tech University, with half using BACCII++ to generate C++ code, and the other half using only C++. For each course in each semester the experiment was run, the sections using BACCII++ did significantly better in overall performance.
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