Novice programmers have a misconception of what programming is in the early stages of learning programming. A Flowchart-based Programming Environment (FPE) is developed in this research with the aim of introducing the early stages of learning programming to clarify matters. An attempt is made to introduce the basic programming algorithms prior to surface structure using an automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach in order to improve students' problem-solving skills. Thus, this system allows students to focus less on language and syntax and more on solution designing in the form of flowchart development. The main objective of this study is to support the problem-solving ability through designing activities. How exactly FPE employs text-to-flowchart conversion as a visualization-based approach to provide the students with their final flowchart for subsequent stages of programming is discussed in this paper. The proposed system is evaluated using 50 first-year undergraduate students taking their first introductory courses in programming called "Programming 1" at University of Malaya, who gave very positive feedback. A very awarding finding was that an automatic text-to-flowchart conversion approach applied in FPE successfully motivated almost all participants in problem-solving activities. Consequently, the results suggest further development of a text-to-flowchart conversion approach in the form of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) in future in order to make the early stages of learning programming more encouraging for students.