Visual Programming without Procedures

In this paper, we motivate the idea of visual programming without procedures or functions. If a visual program contains several similar cases, then the user need only implement one case and use built-in domain sensitive algorithms that “imitate” the implemented case to automatically produce visual code for the similar cases. This work contributes to visual programming research in two ways. First, it eliminates the need for the user to structure visual code. Second, it reduces the complexity of the visualizations thus making the visual code more apparent. We demonstrate our method using Opsis, a system we built to teach binary tree algorithms.