An evaluation method for panoramic understanding of programming by comparison with visual examples

In recent years, professionals in different fields have become able to do programming by using simplified software tools, as a consequence of this they are becoming able to understand programming in a general or “panoramic” way. This understanding is not evaluated by current programming abilities testing methods such as written paper tests or practical programming. This paper proposes a Programmed Visual Contents Comparison Method to assess programming ability, and additionally, a testing system based on this method. With this method, by comparing 2 displayed images and interactive animations produced by programming samples (a question) a subject must decide which one of the programs is more difficult to build with programming than the other, or, if the difficulty is similar for both of them. The validity of the method is confirmed by comparing the ability reported by programming teachers with the results of an experiment performed with a testing system.

I. Introduction

During the last two decades, software development has changed drastically, more and more people not involved in professional software development have become able to do programming and new resources to make programming easier have been created. For example: several amounts of code samples and tutorials are being uploaded to the web and used through copy-pasting; a large amount of algorithms are constantly being converted into libraries and made widely available, so to find the best-suited function within libraries has become an important task; and several visual software development tools and languages, where the programming code is hidden and it can be applied with “just a click” are being developed.