A Simplified Language S2 And Its Visual Programming Method

Along with the popularity of modern computing applications and the advent of a ubiquitous computing society,programming is gradually becoming a popular skill.One of the basic elements of programming is language,whose mechanism and form directly affects the cognitive complexity and application efficiency of programming for learners.Existing programming languages generally show professional characteristics,and have high-order thinking characteristic,which restrict the enthusiasm and efficiency of ordinary learners.Therefore,in view of the new application requirements,the development of programming languages should consider how to effectively reduce the cognitive load of users in programming,by programming language and programming tools.At the same time,how to make users obtain good thinking training is also an important direction of research.Aiming at the problem of high cognitive load of current programming activities,this thesis proposes a simplified programming language S2 and its corresponding visual programming method by analyzing the unified principle of language mechanism and studying how to reduce the cognitive demand of programming method.The main work includes the following four aspects.(1)The main sources of cognitive load in programming are studied based on cognitive load theory.The basic elements of programming,the construction methods and importance of programming languages,and the infrastructure of programming tools are also studied.These studies lay a foundation for the research on methods to reduce cognitive load of programming activities,and provide theoretical support for the construction of S2 language mechanism and the research on programming methods.(2)Based on the basic principles and features of computational thinking,the application features of the principles of computational thinking in language are explored.Combined with the nature of language construction,a method to reduce the higher-order features of existing language expression mechanisms is proposed,and construction principle of meta-order language rules that can realize the lower-order cognitive cost of higher-order expression forms is also proposed.On this basis,a simplified programming language S2 is proposed,and its linguistic characteristics are analyzed and compared with existing similar languages.(3)In order to solve the problem of redundant expressions brought by the cognitive simplicity of S2,the corresponding visual programming methods are further investigated to achieve further reduction of cognitive load.The method is also compared and analyzed with similar methods.(4)Based on the above research,the corresponding language interpreter and the corresponding visual programming tools are implemented.The effectiveness and practicability of them are verified by application case.At the same time,the thinking characteristics of S2 language and its visual programming method are analyzed.The studies show that the simplified language S2 proposed in this thesis has advantages in terms of simplicity of language rules and cognitive complexity of language.It is also shown that the visual programming method of S2 has relative advantages in meeting the general programming needs and reducing the cognitive load of users in programming,which can effectively reduce the cognitive difficulty of programming activities.At the same time,the combination of top-down structured thinking and computational thinking fully reflects the value of the language and method in helping users train their thinking ability.