Benefits of Teaching Design Skills before Teaching Logo Computer Programming: Evidence for Syntax-Independent Learning

We compared two groups of twenty computer-naive college students as they received instruction and practice in writing Logo programs. The design group received pretraining in general design principles such as modularity (breaking a procedure into parts) and reusability (using the same subprocedure more than once) presented in English whereas the no-design group did not. On programming assignments during Logo learning, the design group generated more revision cycles, more test runs, more syntax errors, and more input lines than the no-design group; and the design group wrote final programs that were shorter, more modular, more efficient, and more flexible than the no-design group. However, the groups generally did not differ on cognitive tests such spatial cognition, instruction comprehension, and planning. These results are consistent with Dyck and Mayer's syntax-independent access theory—planning skills for programming can be learned independently of the syntax of the programming language 1.