| What would have happened if the question had been rephrased to "Ok, you have stop car, start car and check car. What do you do to restart a car"? Perhaps they would have done a lot better because they have a better understanding of the car domain. The purpose of a visual language is not to replace domain experience. If you put me in front of a drawing program with a pallet of red, blue and green and ask me to create the color cyan... Then we're gonna have a bad time. Visual programming does not claim that critical thinking is not required: aka programming in this context. We've chatted with people who've said "I can not get the coding thing. That has always been hard for me. Designing and taking bigger concepts and parts and putting them together: assembly. I get that." These people can solve problems, they understand critical thinking. They have expertise in their domain. What they don't get is a mapping process of automating a real world system (what programming is) in a computing device by coding out the solution. Don't even get me started on education where students are expected to learn how to think critically (do that mapping thing) and fight with, to them, totally nonsensical compiler errors as they try to learn coding and syntax. In my opinion, a lot of brilliant future programmers are lost because they don't enjoy fighting the compiler/interpreter. |
I still think that connecting up a hundred little boxes is just as complicated as actually looking at code syntax, but even more so since everything is a black box. How do you suggest people fix errors in the output when the only action they can take is to connect boxes with lines?