From Blocks to Professional Development - Thoughts on the Future of Educational Programming

Systems for programming education currently fall into two categories: block-based systems built around structure editors almost exclusively used for early programming instruction to young learners, and professional environments that use text-based languages and are edited at character level. Here, we argue that combining the two approaches into a single system can have benefits. We discuss frame-based editing, a combination of text and blocks, and its potential to improve the landscape of programming education. We argue that frame-based systems can help support the transition from blocks to text-based programming, and that frame-based systems in themselves may be a reasonable endpoint in programming education for a majority of learners.