Source code is inherently abstract. While this is necessary to capture the generality of a program, it poses a barrier to understanding and learning to use the underlying concepts. In education, especially in abstract subjects like maths, the use of concrete examples is considered instrumental to the acquisition of knowledge and a frequently explored direction for teaching computational concepts. Besides concreteness, the importance of examples being close to their abstract descriptions as well as the immediacy of feedback has been highlighted.

Babylonian Programming (BP) is a type of example-based live programming that fulfills all three criteria by introducing concrete values, moving them as close as possible to the code, and updating them immediately in response to changes of either the example or the code. This makes BP a promising tool in education, yet no studies on the suitability of BP in a learning context have been conducted. Hence, we propose to (1.) investigate usability of state-of-the-art BP to minimize the friction of introducing BP in education, and (2.) measure the learning effectiveness and quality of experience of a BP environment in undergraduate software engineering education. For these studies, we will use the Smalltalk-based Babylonian/S as our environment.

Besides clearer guidelines on the design of BP and example- based systems in general, we expect to shed light on the qualities that teacher-provided examples need to exhibit and the opportunities for learners to create their own examples during experimentation with unknown concepts.