End-User Experiences of Visual and Textual Programming Environments for Arduino

Tracey Booth, Simone Stumpf

Abstract: Arduino is an open source electronics platform aimed at hobbyists, artists, and other people who want to make things but do not necessarily have a background in electronics or programming. We report the results of an exploratory empirical study that investigated the potential for a visual programming environment to provide benefits with respect to efficacy and user experience to end-user programmers of Arduino as an alternative to traditional text-based coding. We also investigated learning barriers that participants encountered in order to inform future programming environment design. Our study provides a first step in exploring end-user programming environments for open source electronics platforms.