A tool to facilitate interactive and collaborative learning of execution flow and code for novice computer science students

• Main Author: Westerlund, Robert
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Mälardalens högskola, Akademin för innovation, design och teknik 2014
• Subjects: Computer Sciences; Datavetenskap (datalogi)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-25590

Some students reading courses in introductory imperative programming at university level struggle with the course and the drop-out rates from the courses are rather high. One possible reason for this is that some find programming hard to learn. There are many tools which aim to help students learn programming by visualizing the state and execution of code. However, most, if not all, of these tools visualize only the current state of the program being visualized. The first and foremost result of this project is a look into a way to approach visualizing historic information about previous program states in a program visualization tool, in addition to visualizing the current state. The project also created the Code Tracer for Programming Learners (CT4PL) tool which was used during the project to test, evaluate and communicate around the visualization design. This report describes the reasoning behind and the design of the CT4PL tool, which tries to extend the common approach to program visualization tools by not only visualizing the current state of the program being visualized, but also provide the learner with an historic trace of the whole program execution.