What is the name of your organization?
Vittascience
What is the name of your solution?
Vittascience coding platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Vittascience empowers STEM education with coding interfaces, featuring a bi-directional translation (blocks ↔ text) for inclusion and accessibility.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Paris, France
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
France
What type of organization is your solution team?
For-profit, including B-Corp or similar models
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Computer programming fosters the development of computational thinking skills, which enhance students skills such as problem-solving, logical reasoning, and abstraction. The growing integration of programming into school curricula – with over 50 countries having introduced it at various levels of K12 education – have created a substantial demand for accessible and effective teaching tools.
However, current approaches to programming education often fail to address the diverse needs of learners, particularly those with disabilities or limited access to resources (Ladner et al., 2018 | Lash, 2021). For instance, leading platforms such as MIT’s Scratch (used by over 90 million users worldwide) are criticized for their lack of accessibility for visually deficient students (Mountapmbeme, Okafor, Ludi, 2022).
In France, the Ministry of Education estimates that 3% of students are subject to learning disabilities (DEPP, 2021). The European Accessibility Act, making it mandatory for digital services to be accessible (conformance to WCAG at Level AA), is about to take effect in June 2025.
Vittascience addresses these challenges by offering a programming educational platform designed for inclusivity and adaptability through an innovative bi-directionnal translation between visual blocks and text code, ensuring accessibility for students of all backgrounds and skill levels.
What is your solution?
Programming learning tools generally fall into two categories: visual interfaces, like block-based programming, and text-based interfaces, such as those using Python.
Visual programming is easier to understand (Romero, Noirpoudre and Viéville, 2018), because it involves the perception of block shapes, is simpler to manipulate thanks to the block lists, and is more accessible to non-English speakers as the blocks are translated. Whereas text programming is more comprehensive as there are no blocks to do everything, faster to write especially for large programs and closer to skills of the professional world (Weintrop & Wilensky, 2019).
A third approach, the hybrid interface, combines both methods by displaying visual blocks and text code side-by-side. According to research (Blanchard et al., 2020; Matsuzawa et al., 2015; Weintrop & Holbert, 2017), the ability to match a textual program to its visual equivalent promotes the development of understanding of the program’s syntax.
The programming interfaces of Vittascience feature a hybrid mode, allowing block-based visual code, text-based code in Python, or both at the same time. This hybrid interface features a bi-directional translation system, enabling blocks to be automatically translated into text and vice versa. This innovation bridges the accessibility gap of block-based programming.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Vittascience is designed to support students from 4th grade to the end of high school, allowing a soft transition from block-based to text-based coding. Studies show that in France, only 47% of 15-year-olds report feeling confident in using digital tools for learning tasks (PISA, OECD, 2022).
Vittascience addresses these gaps by offering a hybrid programming platform that allows students to learn through both visual block-based coding and text-based code, with bi-directional translation. This enables students to start at their level and gradually develop the skills needed for more advanced programming. Moreover, the platform is compatible with all the hardware found in classrooms (robots, programmable boards, drones, etc.) and includes simulators which compensate for the lack of equipment.
In partnership with the University of Montpellier, we designed and conducted an experiment to assess the effectiveness of different programming interfaces with 130 students aged 15–16, equivalent to 10th grade in the U.S. system. The students scored 34.35% with the hybrid interface, 10.92 percentage points more than with the blocks interface (23.43%). The students also preferred the hybrid interface (35.79%), 7.63 percentage points more than the blocks interface (28.16%).
