Design and evaluation of a scaffolded block-based learning environment for hierarchical data structures

This paper presents the design of Blocks4DS, a block-based environment for students to learn data structures. As a proof-of-concept, we designed custom blocks to allow students to build and visualize Binary Search Trees (BST). Blocks4DS is built on Blockly and uses vis.js to provide visualizations of the binary search tree and its operations. This paper describes the results from an initial evaluation of usability and student learning.