Question

Which is the better tool for learning programming—flowcharts or pseudocode? Cite any educational research you can find.

Answer 1

Flowcharts is best used to diagram how a program will function, as in part of the design of a program, or to document how it does function. The former might be useful to a beginner trying to design a program.

Pseudocode is better used as a communications tool; i.e., a way to help explain something either during design or debugging. It can prove to be very helpful when discussing or explaining to other developers because it allows one to omit irrelevant details and syntactic sugar more useful to the computer than to a human reader.

In my opinion, flowcharts are a better tool to learn programming among the two, but it would be better to learn programming by writing actual code.