Targeting program visualizations

… of the Annual Meeting of the …, 2008

The teaching of fundamental programming skills is a field that extensively uses different kinds of tools to enhance learning experience. These tools come in several sizes, offering wide range of different equipment or approaches to the teaching of introductory programming curricula. At the same time, computer sciences, and programming courses in particular, suffer from high drop-out rates and falling student grades. Students lose interest on programming because of several complex models and structures have to be learned before anything visually impressive can be created. This problem is intensified by the new multimedia environments like games and applets, whereas command line programs and data algorithms have lost impact and are not considered interesting. So can visualization tools be used to increase the student motivation and create motivational tasks to promote interest towards programming?

Learning to Build and Comprehend Complex Information Structures: PROLOG as a Case Study, 1999

How can we best facilitate the progress of students new to computer programming? This question has been of interest for many years to researchers in Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Human-Computer Interaction. The scope of relevant emphases includes the use of clear execution models (du Boulay et al., 1981); the intertwining roles of language, environment, and curriculum (Eisenstadt, 1983); cognitive models of learners' planning behaviour (Anderson et al., 1984); and automatic program debuggers which ...

1992

Abstract: The long-term future of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) for the teaching of programming is severely hampered by weaknesses which prevent ITSs from scaling up to cater for either a wide audience or a broad curriculum. The weaknesses include an emphasis on toy examples, the use of instruction-based (as opposed to guided discovery-based) teaching, a lack of attention to user interfaces, and the belief that it is possible to create a comprehensive bug catalogue.

Program Visualization (PV) is a technique that has been found useful in teaching computing programming. This has seen proliferation in development of PV tools with an aim of enhancing teaching/learning programming over the last two decades. However, the tools usage has remained minimal. Perhaps because it becomes challenging to ascertain the appropriate tool for the right task. This paper presents a classification of program visualization tools with the focus of aiding teachers and students in choosing the most appropriate tool for an interesting experience in the classroom. The paper is based on six various PV tools evaluated over a period of two consecutive academic years in a Kenyan public University. The classification augments the Price’s taxonomy of software visualization arm of PV by presenting four basic levels which are further subdivided into lower levels. Index Terms– Classification, Pedagogy, Program Visualization and Taxonomy

Abstract– Program Visualization (PV) is a technique that has been found useful in teaching computing programming. This has seen proliferation in development of PV tools with an aim of enhancing teaching/learning programming over the last two decades. However, the tools usage has remained minimal. Perhaps because it becomes challenging to ascertain the appropriate tool for the right task. This paper presents a classification of program visualization tools with the focus of aiding teachers and students in choosing the most appropriate tool for an interesting experience in the classroom. The paper is based on six various PV tools evaluated over a period of two consecutive academic years in a Kenyan public University. The classification augments the Price’s taxonomy of software visualization arm of PV by presenting four basic levels which are further subdivided into lower levels.

Teaching computer programming to young students is a major challenge. This paper describes a web-based course for teaching programming using visualization and a gaming theme. Concepts are taught using real world examples that the target students can identify with; in this way some of the problems related to understanding abstract concepts are alleviated and learning occurs in context. The full range of multimedia technology including animation, sound and video are used to immerse the student in an environment where learning is fun and visual display of the concepts reinforce learning. A gaming theme is used for formative assessment. Students are provided with 'game' activities such as "spot the error", "predict the output" and "put in order". These enhance critical thinking. They test comprehension and knowledge as well as higher order thinking skills.

2006

To guide our work on adaptive explanatory program visualization the authors prepared a questionnaire that was broadly distributed among teachers of programming-related subjects. The questionnaire was designed to collect a list of topics that are considered important, but hard to teach and to solicit suggestions on using visualization for teaching these topics. This paper introduces the questionnaire, explains how it was administered, and presents the results that we consider of interest to the teachers of programming community.

2013

Program visualization (PV) is one of the approaches to assist novices in introductory programming courses. We investigated the effect of a newly developed PV tool to teach tracing to first-year programming students at a South-African university. The tool takes the form of an interactive computerbased tutorial that teaches students how to draw variable diagrams (VD). All students registered for the introductory C++ module, received the tutorial with their study material and could use it to help answer assignment questions. To determine the effect of using the tutorial, students did an assignment for which they could use the tutorial and completed a questionnaire. Through the questionnaire we acquired biographical data, found out how students used the tutorial and also how they experienced using it. We then correlated these data statistically with their assignment marks. We found that time spent using the tutorial, programming experience and certain biographical properties contributed to higher marks. Drawing their own VDs to understand and debug programs also contributed to better marks.

Program visualization (PV) is one of the approaches to assist novices in introductory programming courses. We investigated the effect of a newly developed PV tool to teach tracing to first-year programming students at a South-African university. The tool takes the form of an interactive computerbased tutorial that teaches students how to draw variable diagrams (VD). All students registered for the introductory C++ module, received the tutorial with their study material and could use it to help answer assignment questions. To determine the effect of using the tutorial, students did an assignment for which they could use the tutorial and completed a questionnaire. Through the questionnaire we acquired biographical data, found out how students used the tutorial and also how they experienced using it. We then correlated these data statistically with their assignment marks. We found that time spent using the tutorial, programming experience and certain biographical properties contributed to higher marks. Drawing their own VDs to understand and debug programs also contributed to better marks.

Proceedings of Methods, Materials and Tools for …