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

The State Of Play: A Notional Machine for Learning Programming

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine de- sign and implementation to help with understanding of pro- gramming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The no- tional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We in- troduce the notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. We also present Novis, an implementation of a dynamic real-time visualiser of this notional machine, integrated into BlueJ

Novis: A notional machine implementation for teaching introductory programming

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a notional machine imple- mentation, Novis, to help with understanding of program- ming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The notional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine de- signed for comprehension and learning purposes. Novis pro- vides a real-time visualisation of this notional machine, and is integrated into BlueJ

Adding traceability to an educational IDE : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master degree in Computer Science at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

High dropout and failure rate in introductory programming courses indicate the need to improve programming comprehension of novice learners. Some of educational tools have successfully used game environments to motivate students. Our approach is based on a novel type of notional machine which can facilitate programming comprehension in the context of turn-based games. The first aim of this project is to design a layered notional machine that is reversible. This type of notional machine provides bi-directional traceability and supports multiple layers of abstraction. The second aim of this project is to explore the feasibility and in particular to evaluate the performance of using the traceability in a web-based environment. To achieve these aims, we implement this type of notional machine through instrumentation and investigate the capture of the entire execution state of a program. However, capturing the entire execution state produces a large amount of tracing data that raises scalability issues. Therefore, several encoding and compression methods are proposed to minimise the server work-load. A proof-of-concept implementation which based on the SoGaCo educational web IDE is presented. The evaluation of the educational benefits and end user studies are outside the scope of this thesis

Scaffolded autoethnography: a method for examining practice-to-research

Teachers often perceive educational research as confusing and can be disenfranchised by the research process. We propose scaffolded authethnography as a method to support principled examination of authentic practice. The approach is appealing because it is motivated by the teacher’s own day-to-day practice in a research context. Our demonstration of this method uses an analytical autoethnographic approach coupled with a data capture tool that documents the pedagogic content knowledge of a practicing teacher. We include a short case-study description where the method was used in the context of research in the area of threshold concept identification

Debugging: The Key to Unlocking the Mind of a Novice Programmer?

Novice programmers must master two skills to show lasting success: writing code and, when that fails, the ability to debug it. Instructors spend much time teaching the details of writing code but debugging gets significantly less attention. But what if teaching debugging could implicitly teach other aspects of coding better than teaching a language teaching debugging? This paper explores a new theoretical framework, the Theory of Applied Mind for Programming (TAMP), which merges dual process theory with Jerome Bruner’s theory of representations to model the mind of a programmer. TAMP looks to provide greater explanatory power in why novices struggle and suggest pedagogy to bridge gaps in learning. This paper will provide an example of this by reinterpreting debugging literature using TAMP as a theoretical guide. Incorporating new view theoretical viewpoints from old studies suggests a “debugging-first” pedagogy can supplement existing methods of teaching programming and perhaps fill some of the mental gaps TAMP suggests hamper novice programmers

Flexible Low-cost Activities to Develop Novice Code Comprehension Skills in Schools

The lack of code comprehension skills in novice programming students is recognised as a major factor underpinning poor learning outcomes. We use Schulte’s Block Model to support teachers’ understanding of how to break the skill down into component parts that are more manageable for a learner. This analysis is operationalised in three code annotation-based learning/assessment exercise formats, two helping students to identify and describe programming concepts and the third enabling them to parse code correctly and carry out desk executions. A great benefit of the activities is that they are low cost and can be applied to any imperative style code and so can be easily adopted by schools anywhere; furthermore, they are active, not passive, an issue with some animation-based visualisation approaches. The exercise formats were included as part of a national schools computing science professional learning programme (PLAN C)

The Design and Evaluation of an Educational Software Development Process for First Year Computing Undergraduates

First year, undergraduate computing students experience a series of well-known challenges when learning how to design and develop software solutions. These challenges, which include a failure to engage effectively with planning solutions prior to implementation ultimately impact upon the students’ competency and their retention beyond the first year of their studies. In the software industry, software development processes systematically guide the development of software solutions through iterations of analysis, design, implementation and testing. Industry-standard processes are, however, unsuitable for novice programmers as they require prior programming knowledge. This study investigates how a researcher-designed educational software development process could be created for novice undergraduate learners, and the impact of this process on their competence in learning how to develop software solutions. Based on an Action Research methodology that ran over three cycles, this research demonstrates how an educational software development methodology (termed FRESH) and its operationalised process (termed CADET which is a concrete implementation of the FRESH methodology), was designed and implemented as an educational tool for enhancing student engagement and competency in software development. Through CADET, students were reframed as software developers who understand the value in planning and developing software solutions, and not as programmers who prematurely try to implement solutions. While there remain opportunities to further enhance the technical sophistication of the process as it is implemented in practice, CADET enabled the software development steps of analysis and design to be explicit elements of developing software solutions, rather than their more typically implicit inclusion in introductory CS courses. The research contributes to the field of computing education by exploring the possibilities of – and by concretely generating – an appropriate scaffolded methodology and process; by illustrating the use of computational thinking and threshold concepts in software development; and by providing a novel evaluation framework (termed AKM-SOLO) to aid in the continuous improvement of educational processes and courses by measuring student learning experiences and competencies

A Study of First Year Undergraduate Computing Students\u27 Experience of Learning Software Development in the Absence of a Software Development Process

Despite the ever-growing demand for software development graduates, it is recognised that a significant barrier for increasing graduate numbers lies in the inherent difficulty in learning how to develop software. This paper presents a study that is part of a larger research project aimed at addressing the gap in the provision of educational software development processes for freshman, novice undergraduate learners, to improve proficiency levels. As a means of understanding how such learners problem solve in software development in the absence of a formal process, this study examines the experiences and depth of learning acquired by a sample set of novice, freshman university learners. The study finds that without the scaffolding of an appropriate structured development process tailored to novices, students are in danger of failing to engage with the problem solving skills necessary for software development, particularly the skill of designing solutions prior to coding