EROSI—visualising recursion and discovering new errors

George, Carlisle

doi:10.1145/330908.331875

Cited by 24 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The forward passing of control is called the "active flow" and the backward flow of control is called the "passive flow" [1]. Mental models of recursion describe students' understanding of recursion and a number have been discovered [4,3].…”

Section: Mental Models Of Recursionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental models of recursion revisited

Sanders

Galpin

Götschi

2006

Proceedings of the 11th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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Students struggle to understand recursion and we need to find good ways to teach the concept. We believe that an understanding of the mental models of recursion that students develop will assist us in teaching them more effectively. In 2003 we reported on a study of the mental models our students developed. This paper discusses some changes that we made to our teaching in 2003 after that study. An analysis of the students' mental models in 2003, 2004 and 2005 shows that more students are developing the copies model of recursion which is always a viable model.

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Section: Mental Models Of Recursionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental models of recursion revisited

Sanders

Galpin

Götschi

2006

Proceedings of the 11th Annual SIGCSE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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“…Most of them are based on the "copies model" of recursion, that is, they show a different copy of either code or data for each recursive call. We may cite Recursion Animator [15], SimRECUR [16], Function Visualizer [3] and EROSI [6]. Flopex 2 [4] is an Excel extension for visual programming.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

SRec

2008

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In this paper we describe SRec, a system to animate recursion in Java programs. It is intended to assist in algorithm courses to better understand and analyze algorithm behavior. We make several contributions. Firstly, SRec exhibits a comprehensive set of animation and educational features. It provides three complementary, coordinated views of recursion: traces, the execution stack and activation trees. SRec allows the user constructing and modifying animations without effort. The animation can be played flexibly, both forward and backwards. It also provides facilities to integrate animations into courses. Secondly, the paper describes the educational features of the system and its use in algorithm courses. Thirdly, the system has been fully evaluated with respect to usability (using formative and summative methods) and has been compared to other systems reported in the literature. The results of both evaluations are highly positive.

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“…Further investigation of these subjects revealed that five of them had demonstrated a 'good understanding' of the copies execution of the similarly structured embedded recursive algorithm in Question 2, and eleven for Question 3. A 'good understanding' meant that either the question was answered correctly or the subject made a simple error (due to exogenous factors [4]) during the particular task.…”

Section: Summaw Of Findingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recursion is a powerful aroblem solving technique in programming [ 1] and therefore ~,n important area for computer science education research. George [3,4] developed the EROSI (Explicit Representer o f Subprogram Invocations) tutor to aid novices in developing the copies model o f recursion which experts possess [7]. In the copies model, recursion is defined as a process which is capable o f triggering new instantiations (or copies) o f itself with control passing forward to successive instantiations (active flow) and back to suspended ones (passive flow).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using visualization to aid program construction tasks

George

2002

Proceedings of the 33rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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This paper discusses how novices exposed to an execution model of recursion (similar to an expert's mental model and visualised in the EROSI tutor) performed on the task o f constructing an embedded recursive solution to a given problem specification. Empirical observations showed that affter using the EROSI tutor, novices employed a variety o f methods during program construction including the use o f their understanding o f the execution process o f recursion from their visualisation experiences. Using our findings we provide some useful suggestions to inform teaching practice. We conclude that when teaching about recursion: visualising program execution models can be a useful aid to program construction, by providing a mental framework for reasoning about the behaviour o f program code fragments both before and after coding; visualisation methods m a y not always be a sufficient condition for developing programming skills; and the teaching o f techniques for program construction may be necessary.

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EROSI—visualising recursion and discovering new errors

Cited by 24 publications

References 7 publications

Mental models of recursion revisited

Mental models of recursion revisited

SRec

Using visualization to aid program construction tasks

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