Undergraduate Students' Brain Activity in Visual and Textual Programming.

Eight computer science students, novice programmers, who were in the first semester of their studies, participated in a field study in order to explore potential differences in their brain activity during programming with a visual versus a textual programming language. The students were asked to develop two specific programs in both programming languages (a total of four tasks). Measurements of cerebral activity were performed by the electroencephalography (EEG) imaging method. According to data analysis, it appears that the type of programming language did not affect the students' brain activity.