FLARE v2: A Recursive Framework for Program Comprehension Across Common Teaching Languages and Levels of Abstraction

TL;DR

FLARE v2 offers a recursive, semiotically informed framework for understanding program meaning across abstraction levels in teaching languages, emphasizing causal and communicative bindings and visualizing compositional structures.

Contribution

It introduces a recursive, semiotic approach to program comprehension that unifies multiple abstraction levels and distinguishes control flow types in educational programming environments.

Findings

Defines a new recursive framework for program understanding.

Visualizes compositional moves with the Compositional Ladder.

Focuses on imperative and event-driven programming in education.

Abstract

Building on the classroom framework in Heath et al. (2025), this paper proposes FLARE v2 as a recursive, semiotically informed account of how program meaning can be described across abstraction scales in common teaching languages. It reframes FLARE v1's tiers as one cycle: identify bounded elements (Receives, Sends, Effects, Shares), analyse bindings along two dimensions (Causal-Temporal and Communicative), and treat the bound set as a new element at the next scale. Causal-Temporal binding has three subtypes - Sequential, Branch, and Event - to distinguish user-authored control flow from event-driven control whose dispatch is hidden in the runtime. A Compositional Ladder visualises the same compositional move from blocks and statements through segments and systems. FLARE v2 is scoped to imperative and event-driven environments typical of primary and lower-secondary curricula. Above the system layer, behaviour is increasingly shaped by interaction between code and operating context (scheduling, infrastructure, permissions, contracts, failures, platform policy). Here, the element-and-binding vocabulary remains a structural baseline, but continuity of explanation typically requires overlays that make environmental constraints explicit. Event binding and overlays serve a common pedagogical role - preserving coherent structural reasoning where key causal mechanisms are not fully visible in the authored artefact. OOP design reasoning, explicit concurrency models, distributed systems, and functional paradigms are treated as future extensions; implementation and evaluation are left for future work.