In the current era of information technology, students need to learn modern programming languages efficiently. The art of teaching/learning programming requires many logical and conceptual skills. So it’s a challenging task for the instructors/learners to teach/learn these programming languages effectively and efficiently. Mind mapping is a useful visual tool for establishing ideas and connecting them to solve problems. This research proposed an effective way to teach programming languages through visual tools. This experimental study uses a mind mapping tool to teach two programming environments: Text-based Programming and Blocks-based Programming. We performed the experiments with one hundred and sixty undergraduate students of two public sector universities in the Asia Pacific region. Four different instructional approaches, including block-based language (BBL), text-based languages (TBL), mind map with text-based language (MMTBL) and mind mapping with block-based (MMBBL) are used for this purpose. The results show that instructional approaches using a mind mapping tool to help students solve given tasks in their critical thinking are more effective than other instructional techniques.