The Effectiveness of a Program Visualization Tool on Introductory Programming: A Case Study with PythonTutor

Abstract

Program Visualization (PV) is an educational tool frequently used to assist users for understanding a program flow. However, despite its clear benefits, PV cannot be incorporated easily on Introductory Programming course. Several key properties such as student characteristics and behavior should be considered beforehand. This paper is intended to provide an empirical review about the impact of PV toward students of Introductory Programming course. For our case study, PythonTutor is selected as a sample of PVs due to its accessibility. It can be accessed anywhere and anytime through a web browser. Three conclusions are obtained based on our evaluation on data collected from a survey. Firstly, PV is quite effective to assist students for conducting several programming sub-tasks. Secondly, PV, at some extent, may help students to learn advanced topics on Introductory Programming course. Finally, despite the fact that several features should be incorporated to enhance understanding of students, PV is beneficial for learning Introductory Programming course, especially when it is frequently used.

A Quasi-Experimental Design to Evaluate the Use of PythonTutor on Programming Laboratory Session

“…On the one hand, our work is dif-ferent with a work proposed in [20] since our work is more focused on laboratory session instead of theory session. Further, the work in [20] is focused on introductory course while our work is focused on basic data structure course.…”

“…On the one hand, our work is dif-ferent with a work proposed in [20] since our work is more focused on laboratory session instead of theory session. Further, the work in [20] is focused on introductory course while our work is focused on basic data structure course. On the other hand, our work is different with a work proposed in [21] since our work evaluates the impact of PythonTutor through student performance rather than student perspective.…”

“…Such finding is deducted from the fact that the mean score for the intervened sessions is lower than the score for the un-intervened ones. We would argue that such negative correlation is caused by the fact that most students on the group 1 had never used the tool before they took BDS course [20]. Therefore, they might feel that such tool mitigated them for completing their task, considering that PythonTutor UI is not intuitive enough for students [20], [21].…”

“…Such finding is deducted from the fact that the mean score for the intervened sessions is higher than the score for the un-intervened ones. We would argue that such positive correlation is caused by the fact that most students from group 2 had used the tool before they took BDS course [20]. They might have been adapted to such tool, resulting in a positive impact regarding the use of PythonTutor.…”

“…It is important to note that our work is different with works proposed in [20] and [21] that also evaluate the impact of PythonTutor. On the one hand, our work is dif-ferent with a work proposed in [20] since our work is more focused on laboratory session instead of theory session.…”