Towards a Metaphor-Based Tangible Toolkit for Learning Programming Concepts.

This paper reports from design research developing a prototype for a metaphor-based tangible toolkit reifying basic programming concepts. We elicit a list of metaphors using expert interviews with computer science lectures and co-design workshops with programming students and professional software developers. We continue to select metaphors most viable for a tangible toolkit and develop an interactive application for the metaphors mapping 3d models to associated programming code. We assess the application with computer science students to understand how they use the application and how they relate manipulations to the 3d models to changes in the programming code. Our application serves as an example how programming concepts can be represented both as metaphors and tangibles. Our findings build a foundation to guide and inform further research in metaphors and tangibles used in computer science education.