The daily life of a researcher introduced with an online data analysis experience based on visual programming

A common criticism for the Italian higher education system is the gap that separates it from the employment landscape. To improve this situation, our department and schools are sponsoring internships, to expose the students to the work life. Groups of two high school students are invited to work with researchers for a week. A tutor introduces them to the research theme and proposes related activities. In order not to require previous experience with programming languages, the visual programming language Blockly is used as the development toolkit, for its suitability for educational activities. We present the development of new functionalities for Blockly purposely for the project: online reading data from a real detection system, interactive analysis, and online data visualization. The activity was successfully experienced by the students hosted in the research group. The actual implementation of the analysis algorithm was quickly achieved, even with no prior experience with data analysis. We bypassed the difficulties related to the syntax of programming languages, by employing Blockly and our added features; this allowed us to focus on the fundamental concepts. The students enjoyed the whole experience and were very proactive asking relevant questions and proposing ideas.