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

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

Incorporating visual and animation teaching tools in computer programming classes for effective teaching and learning

The problems in teaching and learning programming techniques prevail all over the world. Learning programming logic without utilizing any visualization material is difficult. One possible solution to overcome this problem is by using program animation. The proposed program animation software used in teaching novices learning introductory programming is JELIOT 3. The aim of this project is to investigate the effectiveness of teaching programming classes for beginners using programming tool JELIOT 3 that incorporate visualization and animation, specifically the outcome of students’ performances before and after using JELIOT 3. The study population is novice students with no significant programming experience. They were drawn from an on campus section of second semester Foundation in Business Information Technology introductory programming course at INTI International College, Subang Jaya. The class size when this study was conducted was only 9 students. The 9 students were divided into two groups at random. The first group (POST-JELIOT) received standard classroom lectures then followed by JELIOT 2. The second group (PRE-JELIOT) received the JELIOT 3 lesson and then the traditional classroom lecture. From the findings, there was a significant difference in performance when comparing between students who are first taught JELIOT 3 in the overall assessments on the two programming tests and on the two array model assessments. The implications then are that a visual teaching and animated illustration to programming is an effective method for teaching programming. Instruction in computer programming must make use of such visualization to develop good mental visualization of programming. (Abstract by author

Visualization/animation of programs based on abstract representations and formal mappings

In the context of Alma (a system for program visualization and algorithm animation), we use an internal representation-based on the concept of an attributed abstract syntax tree decorated with attribute values, a DAST-to associate (static) figures to grammar rules (productions) and to step over program dynamics executing state changes in order to perform its animation. We do not rely upon any source program annotations (visual/animation statements, or parameters), neither on any special visual data types. On account of such principle, the approach becomes source language independent. It means that we can apply the same visualizer and animator, that is the Alma's back-end, to different programming languages; all that we need is different front-ends to parse each program into the DAST we use. In this paper we discuss Alma design goals and architecture, and we present the two mappings that associate to productions figures and rewriting rules to systematically draw a visual representation (exhibiting data and control flow) of a given source program and to animate its execution.FC

Studi Komparatif Program Visual Dinamis untuk Pembelajaran Algoritma dan Pemograman Berorientasi Objek

As beginners, many first-year students have difficulty understanding object-oriented programming material. To help students learn algorithmic and object-oriented programming material researchers have developed visual programming (PV). Visual programming is a tool to facilitate learning programming. The concept of learning to use PV visualizes the work processes of algorithms and programming. This research aims to compare three dynamic PV tools for object-oriented learning programming that are the most studied. To determine the PV to be compared, a survey was conducted in an online journal database, such as IEEE explore, ACM, and several well-known online publishers. From the survey results, three dynamic PVs were chosen, most widely discussed, namely Jeliot 3, Ville and Jive. All three tools are installed and studied. Comparison results show that each dynamic PV has advantages on certain characteristics. The instructor can choose visual programming by considering the advantages of each PV