DRAFT-What you always wanted to know but could not find about block-based environments

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews 152 studies and 32 tools on block-based environments, providing an inventory and analysis of their components, development, and usage across various domains.

Contribution

It offers a comprehensive survey of block-based environments, detailing their main components, engineering approaches, and diverse applications beyond educational contexts.

Findings

Provides an extensive inventory of block-based editors

Identifies key components and engineering practices

Highlights diverse usage domains

Abstract

Block-based environments are visual programming environments, which are becoming more and more popular because of their ease of use. The ease of use comes thanks to their intuitive graphical representation and structural metaphors (jigsaw-like puzzles) to display valid combinations of language constructs to the users. Part of the current popularity of block-based environments is thanks to Scratch. As a result they are often associated with tools for children or young learners. However, it is unclear how these types of programming environments are developed and used in general. So we conducted a systematic literature review on block-based environments by studying 152 papers published between 2014 and 2020, and a non-systematic tool review of 32 block-based environments. In particular, we provide a helpful inventory of block-based editors for end-users on different topics and domains. Likewise, we focused on identifying the main components of block-based environments, how they are engineered, and how they are used. This survey should be equally helpful for language engineering researchers and language engineers alike.