RULER: Prebugging with Proxy-Based Programming

While block-based programming has successfully eliminated critical syntactic barriers to programming, it remains unclear how effectively it aids in overcoming semantic, logical, and pragmatic programming challenges that hinder computational thinking. These challenges are likely to far outweigh the syntactic ones. With the goal of creating a highly accessible programming tool for young students using mobile devices, we explored the concept of pragmatic prebugging to begin addressing these challenges. By pragmatic prebugging, we refer to proactive debugging tools designed to prevent logical errors. This article introduces RULER.game as a Computational Thinking Tool with built-in pragmatic prebugging, enabling novice programmers to create games through a paradigm we call proxy-based programming. A small study exploring error rates found statistically significant performance improvements of proxy-based programming compared to block-based programming.