Printed in the Philippines ASIA LIFE SCIENCES 24(2): 629-646, 2015 The Asian International Journal of Life Sciences Received 26 November 2014; Accepted 24 December 2014 ©Rushing Water Publishers Ltd. 2015 A flowchart-based programming environment for improving problem solving skills of Cs minors in computer programming D ANIAL HOOSHYAR 1* , RODINA BINTI AHMAD 1 , SHAHABODDIN SHAMSHIRBAND 1 , MOSLEM Y OUSEFI 2 and SHI-JINN HORNG 3 Novice programmers have a misconception of what programming is in the early stages of learning programming. A Flowchart-based Programming Environment (FPE) is developed in this research with the aim of introducing the early stages of learning programming to clarify matters. An attempt is made to introduce the basic programming algorithms prior to surface structure using an automatic text-to-lowchart conversion approach in order to improve students’ problem-solving skills. Thus, this system allows students to focus less on language and syntax and more on solution designing in the form of lowchart development. The main objective of this study is to support the problem-solving ability through designing activities. How exactly FPE employs text-to-lowchart conversion as a visualization-based approach to provide the students with their inal lowchart for subsequent stages of programming is discussed in this paper. The proposed system is evaluated using 50 irst-year undergraduate students taking their irst introductory courses in programming called “Programming 1” at University of Malaya, who gave very positive feedback. A very awarding inding was that an automatic text-to-lowchart conversion approach applied in FPE successfully motivated almost all participants in problem-solving activities. Consequently, the results suggest further development of a text-to-lowchart conversion approach in the form of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) in future in order to make the early stages of learning programming more encouraging for students. Keywords: programming environments, novice programmers, visualizations, text-to- lowchart conversion 1 Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603, Lembah Pantai, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 2 Center for Systems and Machines Intelligence, College of Engineering, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, 4300, Kajang, Malaysia 3 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan