No abstract

The educational impact of visualization depends not only on how well students learn when they use it, but also on how widely it is used by instructors. Instructors believe that visualization helps students learn. The integration of visualization techniques in classroom instruction, however, has fallen far short of its potential. This paper considers this disconnect, identifying its cause in a failure to understand the needs of a key member in the hierarchy of stakeholders, namely the instructor. We describe these needs and offer guidelines for both the effective deployment of visualizations and the evaluation of instructor satisfaction. We then consider different forms of evaluation and the impact of student learning styles on learner outcomes.

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and visualizations may be used to foster learning. This paper presents a program animation system, PlanAni, that is based on the concept of the roles of variables. Roles represent schematic uses of variables that occur in programs over and over again, and a set of nine roles covers practically all variables in novice-level programs. PlanAni has been tested in a teaching experiment comparing traditional teaching with role-based teaching and animation. The results of a semi-structured interview with the teacher indicate that students like to work with the animator and that the system clarifies many concepts in programming.

The educational impact of visualization depends not only on how well students learn when they use it, but also on how widely it is used by instructors. Instructors believe that visualization helps students learn. The integration of visualization techniques in classroom instruction, however, has fallen far short of its potential. This paper considers this disconnect, identifying its cause in a failure to understand the needs of a key member in the hierarchy of stakeholders, namely the instructor. We describe these needs and offer guidelines for both the effective deployment of visualizations and the evaluation of instructor satisfaction. We then consider different forms of evaluation and the impact of student learning styles on learner outcomes.

Visualizations may be used to assist in learning elementary computer programming - a skill that is hard to acquire by many students. This article presents a program animation system, PlanAni, that is based on the concept of the roles of variables. Roles represent schematic uses of variables that occur in programs over and over again, and a set of nine roles covers practically all variables in novice-level programs. PlanAni has been evaluated in a classroom experiment comparing traditional teaching with role-based teaching and animation. The results suggest that the introduction of roles provides students with a new conceptual framework that enables them to mentally process program information in a way similar to that of good code comprehenders. The use of role-based animation seems to assist in the adoption of role knowledge and expert-like programming strategies. A semi-structured interview with the teacher indicates that students like to work with the animator and that the system clarifies many concepts in programming.