## 1 Introduction  
Modern engineers are frequently forced to acquire programming skills on different levels of advancement and to apply them in multidisciplinary environments. Not all of these engineers will become full-fledged programmers, but sometimes the possibility to use low-code visual programming environments like LabView [1] or App Inventor [2] will be sufficient. In order to give good foundations in adulthood, schools use elements of visual programming to enhance critical and algorithmic thinking of future engineers so that they could easier grasp the idea and syntax of full-fledged programming languages used in a particular engineering domain. [PERSON] [3] presents diverse categories of programming learning activities that could be performed within Scratch. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [4] argue that Scratch can go to the university. A special focus is also put on improving computational thinking concepts learning by Scratch [5], STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and robotics learning [6, 7] or even deep learning [8]. Comparing to Scratch, StarLogo has a bit limited achievements in context of STEM and computational thinking learning, but still is important for the field [9, 10]. Another solution is providing visual environments that would be usable enough to efficiently aid engineering tasks and democatize [11] application development. Such a trend can be seen in the scientific literature as well. App Inventor might be perceived as such a visual environment, additionally being a proven tool in computational thinking learning [5]. Among others, it was used for the following engineering-like purposes: building GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications)-based home automation systems [12], building Bluetooth-based smart homes [13], selecting machining parameters [14], building an IoT (Internet of Things) application to collect and analyze sensor data [15], building 3-axis filament winding machine control systems [16], and many others. In parallel there is a pending discussion about positive role of the visual programming environments in education. Few of examples are worth to be mentioned. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [17] investigate the influence of Scratch and App Inventor on the development of skills and competencies for learning in higher education. Among the skills and competences the following are mentioned: autonomy, attention, motivation, critical thinking, creative thinking, computational thinking, communication, problem solving and social interaction. [PERSON] and [PERSON] [18] attempt to observe how the block-based environment (i.e., StarLogo) can facilitate the problems caused by the abstractness of textual programming languages. [PERSON] et al. [19] investigate whether App Inventor and Scratch can contribute to increasing interest in computer science classes. Finally, [PERSON] et al. [20] and [PERSON] [21] investigate how App Inventor, Scratch and StarLogo can make computer science education more accessible to everyone. All of these are the reasons why App Inventor, Scratch and StarLogo were used as the case studies in this article. They are one of the leading visual programming environments and the outcomes of their applications are positively presented in the scientific literature. To give just two examples of popularity scale: in November 2023 Scratch reported \(\sim\)121 million registered users; on 1 October 2024, App Inventor reported that total number of created projects was 108.2 million. Please follow the links to the official reports [22; 23] to see detailed statistics. The proof of these solutions being present in scientific literature are the works cited in the previous paragraphs and Section 2.1. At last, another reasons are missing fair usability and accessibility assessments, and being provided and managed for many years by a well-established entity, i.e., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA.