Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

Towards a debugging tutor for object-oriented environments

Programming has provided a rich domain for Artificial Intelligence in Education and many systems have been developed to advise students about the bugs in their programs, either during program development or post-hoc. Surprisingly few systems have been developed specifically to teach debugging. Learning environment builders have assumed that either the student will be taught these elsewhere or thatthey will be learnt piecemeal without explicit advice.This paper reports on two experiments on Java debugging strategy by novice programmers and discusses their implications for the design of a debugging tutor for Java that pays particular attention to how students use the variety of program representations available. The experimental results are in agreement with research in the area that suggests that good debugging performance is associated with a balanced use ofthe available representations and a sophisticated use of the debugging step facility which enables programmers to detect and obtain information from critical momentsin the execution of the program. A balanced use of the available representations seemsto be fostered by providing representations with a higher degree of dynamic linkingas well as by explicit instruction about the representation formalism employed in the program visualisations

Simulation modelling and visualisation: toolkits for building artificial worlds

Simulations users at all levels make heavy use of compute resources to drive computational simulations for greatly varying applications areas of research using different simulation paradigms. Simulations are implemented in many software forms, ranging from highly standardised and general models that run in proprietary software packages to ad hoc hand-crafted simulations codes for very specific applications. Visualisation of the workings or results of a simulation is another highly valuable capability for simulation developers and practitioners. There are many different software libraries and methods available for creating a visualisation layer for simulations, and it is often a difficult and time-consuming process to assemble a toolkit of these libraries and other resources that best suits a particular simulation model. We present here a break-down of the main simulation paradigms, and discuss differing toolkits and approaches that different researchers have taken to tackle coupled simulation and visualisation in each paradigm

Visual and Textual Programming Languages: A Systematic Review of the Literature

It is well documented, and has been the topic of much research, that Computer Science courses tend to have higher than average drop out rates at third level. This is a problem that needs to be addressed with urgency but also caution. The required number of Computer Science graduates is growing every year but the number of graduates is not meeting this demand and one way that this problem can be alleviated is to encourage students at an early age towards studying Computer Science courses. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the role of visual and textual programming languages when learning to program, particularly as a first programming language. The approach is systematic, in that a structured search of electronic resources has been conducted, and the results are presented and quantitatively analysed. This study will give insight into whether or not the current approaches to teaching young learners programming are viable, and examines what we can do to increase the interest and retention of these students as they progress through their education.Comment: 18 pages (including 2 bibliography pages), 3 figure

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling

The Effectiveness of Aural Instructions with Visualisations in E-Learning Environments

Based on Mayer’s (2001) model for more effective learning by exploiting the brain’s dual sensory channels for information processing, this research investigates the effectiveness of using aural instructions together with visualisation in teaching the difficult concepts of data structures to novice computer science students. A small number of previous studies have examined the use of audio and visualisation in teaching and learning environments but none has explored the integration of both technologies in teaching data structures programming to reduce the cognitive load on learners’ working memory. A prototype learning tool, known as the Data Structure Learning (DSL) tool, was developed and used first in a short mini study that showed that, used together with visualisations of algorithms, aural instructions produced faster student response times than did textual instructions. This result suggested that the additional use of the auditory sensory channel did indeed reduce the cognitive load. The tool was then used in a second, longitudinal, study over two academic terms in which students studying the Data Structures module were offered the opportunity to use the DSL approach with either aural or textual instructions. Their use of the approach was recorded by the DSL system and feedback was invited at the end of every visualisation task. The collected data showed that the tool was used extensively by the students. A comparison of the students’ DSL use with their end-of-year assessment marks revealed that academically weaker students had tended to use the tool most. This suggests that less able students are keen to use any useful and available instrument to aid their understanding, especially of difficult concepts. Both the quantitative data provided by the automatic recording of DSL use and an end-of-study questionnaire showed appreciation by students of the help the tool had provided and enthusiasm for its future use and development. These findings were supported by qualitative data provided by student written feedback at the end of each task, by interviews at the end of the experiment and by interest from the lecturer in integrating use of the tool with the teaching of the module. A variety of suggestions are made for further work and development of the DSL tool. Further research using a control group and/or pre and post tests would be particularly useful

The Design and Implementation of a Notional Machine for teaching Introductory Programming

Comprehension of both programming and programs is a difficult task for novices to master, with many university courses that feature a programming component demonstrating significant failure and drop out rates. Many theories exist that attempt to explain why this is the case. One such theory, originally postulated by du Boulay, is that students do not understand the properties of the machine; they do not understand what they are or how they are controlling them by writing code. This idea formed the development of the notional machine, which exists solely as an abstraction of the physical machine to aid with its understanding and comprehension. This work contributes a design for a new notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. The notional machine is designed to work with object-oriented languages (in particular Java). It provides several novel contributions over pre-existing models -- while existing similar models are generally constrained to line by line operation, the notional machine presented here can scale effectively across many program sizes, from few objects and lines to many. In addition, it is able to be used in a variety of formats (in both electronic and unplugged form). It also melds together three traditionally separate diagrams that had to be understood simultaneously (the stack trace, class diagram and object heap.) Novis, an implemented version of the notional machine, is also presented and evaluated. It is able to create automatic and animated versions of notional machine diagrams, and has been integrated into BlueJ's main interface. Novis can present static notional machine diagrams at selected stages of program execution, or animate ongoing execution in real time. The evaluation of Novis is presented in two parts. It is first tested alongside a selection of methodically chosen textbook examples to ensure it can visualise a range of useful programs, and it then undergoes usability testing with a group of first year computer science students

Proceedings of the Second Program Visualization Workshop, 2002

The Program Visualization Workshops aim to bring together researchers who design and construct program visualizations and, above all, educators who use and evaluate visualizations in their teaching. The first workshop took place in July 2000 at Porvoo, Finland. The second workshop was held in cooperation with ACM SIGCSE and took place at HornstrupCentret, Denmark in June 2002, immediately following the ITiCSE 2002 Conference in Aarhus, Denmark

Exploring student perceptions about the use of visual programming environments, their relation to student learning styles and their impact on student motivation in undergraduate introductory programming modules

My research aims to explore how students perceive the usability and enjoyment of visual/block-based programming environments (VPEs), to what extent their learning styles relate to these perceptions and finally to what extent these tools facilitate student understanding of basic programming constructs and impact their motivation to learn programming

Blackbox: A Large Scale Repository of Novice Programmers’ Activity

Automatically observing and recording the programming be- haviour of novices is an established computing education research technique. However, prior studies have been con- ducted at a single institution on a small or medium scale, without the possibility of data re-use. Now, the widespread availability of always-on Internet access allows for data col- lection at a much larger, global scale. In this paper we re- port on the Blackbox project, begun in June 2013. Black- box is a perpetual data collection project that collects data from worldwide users of the BlueJ IDE – a programming environment designed for novice programmers. Over one hundred thousand users have already opted-in to Blackbox. The collected data is anonymous and is available to other researchers for use in their own studies, thus benefitting the larger research community. In this paper, we describe the data available via Blackbox, show some examples of analyses that can be performed using the collected data, and discuss some of the analysis challenges that lie ahead