Abstract
Many modern end-user development environments support one of two visual modalities: block-based programming or data-flow programming. In this work, we investigate the tradeoffs between the two modalities in the context of robotics tasks. These often contain both aspects that are better solved with blocks and others that best fit data-flow programming. To address this style of task, we present and discuss two novel programming environment prototypes, one purely block-based and one a hybrid of blocks and data-flow programming. We compare the designs through a controlled experiment with 113 end-user participants, in which we asked them to solve programming and program comprehension tasks using one of the two environments. We find that participants preferred the hybrid environment in direct comparison, but performed better across all tasks and also reported higher usability ratings for blocks.