[javathrowaway]

I feel obliged to mention this talk by Zed Shaw: https://vimeo.com/53062800

It gives an overview and interpretation of a body of neuroscience research in the context of teaching programming. I can't quite summarize the whole talk succinctly (and don't want to lure anyone with catchy titles either) — but my takeaway from it is that those "visual" programming tools are mostly useless and not going to help significantly.

The reason for that being how the brain works: switching back and forth between "visual" and "linguistic" cognition is hard, and requires specific training to do efficiently. Please turn to the talk for references.