A Psychology of Learning BASIC

Abstract

This paper addresses the question: What does a person know following learning of BASIC programming? Several underlying conceptual structures are identified: (1) a transaction is an event that occurs in the computer and involves some operation on some object at some location, (2) a prestatement is a set of transactions corresponding to a line of code, (3) chunks are frequently occurring configurations of prestatements corresponding to several lines of code. © 1979, ACM. All rights reserved.