An exploration of novice compilation behaviour in BlueJ

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An exploration of novice compilation behaviour in BlueJ

Our research explores the process by which beginning programmers go about writing programs. We have focused our explorations on what we call compilation behaviour: the programming behaviour a student engages in while repeatedly editing and compiling their programs in an attempt to make them syntactically, if not semantically, correct. The students whose behaviour we have observed were engaged in learning to program in an objects-first style using BlueJ, an environment designed for supporting novice programmers just starting out with the Java programming language. The significant results of our work are two-fold. First, we have developed tools for visualising the process by which students write their programs. Using these tools, we can quickly obtain valuable information about their process, and use that information to inform further research regarding their behaviour, or apply it immediately in a classroom context to better support the struggling learner. Second, we have proposed a quantification of novice compilation behavior which we call the error quotient. Using this metric, we can determine how well (or poorly) a student fares with syntax errors while learning to program. This quantity, like our tools for visualisation, provides a powerful indicator for how much or little a student is struggling with the language while programming, and correlates significantly with traditional indicators for academic progress

The Transterpreter: A Transputer Interpreter

We have written the Transterpreter, a virtual machine for executing the transputer instruction set. This interpreter is a small, portable, and extensible run-time, intended to be easily ported to handheld computers, mobile phones, and other embedded contexts. In striving for this level of portability, occam programs compiled to Transputer byte-code can currently be run on desktop computers, handhelds, and even the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kit

Torwards Concrete Concurrency: occam-pi on the LEGO Mindstorms

In a world of ad-hoc networks, highly interconnected mobile devices and increasingly large supercomputer clusters, students need models of computation that help them think about dynamic and concurrent systems. Many of the tools currently available for introducing students to concurrency are difficult to use and are not intrinsically motivating. To provide an authentic, hands-on, and enjoyable introduction to concurrency, we have ported occam, a language whose expressive powers are especially compelling for describing communicating dynamic reactive processes, to the LEGO Mindstorms

A Native Transterpreter for the LEGO Mindstorms RCX

The LEGO Mindstorms RCX is a widely deployed educational robotics platform. This paper presents a concurrent operating environment for the Mindstorms RCX, implemented natively using occam-pi running on the Transterpreter virtual machine. A concurrent hardware abstraction layer aids both the developer of the operating system and facilitates the provision of process-oriented interfaces to the underlying hardware for students and hobbyists interested in small robotics platforms

A Cell Transterpreter

The Cell Broadband Engine is a hybrid processor which consists of a PowerPC core and eight vector co-processors on a single die. Its unique design poses a number of language design and implementation challenges. To begin exploring these challenges, we have ported the ttt to the Cell Broadband Engine. The ttt is a small, portable runtime for concurrent languages and can be used as a platform for experimenting with language concepts. This paper describes a preliminary attempt at porting the ttt runtime to the Cell Broadband Engine and explores ways to program it using a concurrent language

Native Code Generation Using the Transterpreter

We are interested in languages that provide powerful abstractions for concurrency and parallelism that execute everywhere, efficiently. Currently, the existing runtime environments for the occam-pi programming language provide either one of these features (portability) or some semblance of the other (performance). We believe that both can be achieved through the careful generation of C from occam-pi, and demonstrate that this is possible using the Transterpreter, a portable interpreter for occam-pi, as our starting point

Safe parallelism for robotic control

During the Spring 2008 semester at Olin College, we introduced the programming language occam-pi to undergraduates as part of their first course in robotics. Students were able to explore image processing and autonomous behavioral control in a parallel programming language on a small mobile robotics platform with just two weeks of tutorial instruction. Our experiences to date suggest that the language and tools we have developed allow the concise expression of complex robotic control systems, and enable the integration of events from the environment in a consistent and safe model for parallel control that is directly expressed in software