Flowcode: An AI-Powered Programming Environment for Scaffolding Iteration in Creative Computing Education
For novice creative coders, this work addresses the challenge of learning from existing code by integrating AI and visualization, but the contribution is incremental.
Flowcode is an AI-powered programming environment that uses flowcharts and a chat interface to help novice creative coders understand and extend existing code. Two studies showed it supports learning to code by scaffolding iteration, though no concrete performance numbers are reported.
Building upon found examples is a popular way people learn to code, especially in creative coding communities where sharing projects and remixing are common practices. But effectively doing so requires being able to 1) understand how existing code works, and 2) extend it by writing code that implements your own ideas, practices that can be challenging for new creative coders. We explored how to support these two processes through the design of Flowcode, a creative coding programming environment that integrates a flowchart for visualizing code structure and a chat interface tailored to support learning to code over vibe coding. We share how we iterated on the design of Flowcode over two studies with new creative coders, reflecting on the roles visualization and friction may play in enabling productive AI-use in computing education.