Research has been undertaken to answer the following question: Can icon-based programming languages be used to teach first year programming concepts to undergraduate students more effectively than text-based languages? BACCII++ is an iconic environment developed at Texas Tech University for teaching procedural and object-oriented programming concepts and languages. Course materials were developed and used under experimental conditions during the 1995-96 school year at Texas Tech University, with half using BACCII++ to generate C++ code, and the other half using only C++. For each course in each semester the experiment was run, the sections using BACCII++ did significantly better in overall performance.