It would seem that some of the most successful applications of visual programming have been in problem domains that are fairly restrictive and well-defined. It is swiftly becoming realized that the creation of educational courseware is one such domain for which are investment of visual programming effort is amply repaid by the pedagogical benefits. Visual languages in this class range from, at one extreme, purely textual programming languages tailored to the manipulation of graphical elements, through languages that are highly visual but which involve the use of textual instructions for low-level operations, to (at the other end of the spectrum) true visual languages for courseware authorising. In this paper, the authors describe their research work on evaluating the suitability of the various approaches to visual authoring.
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