Active Visual Scaffolding by Charles Kelemen and Eugene Turk
Goals and Objectives
- build infrastructure (code and interfaces) for graphical scaffolding
- design in-class exercises and homework projects that will
encourage students in CS I and CS II to actively generate graphical
scaffolding
- entice students to see what their programs are actually doing
- help students to observe the functioning of their programs at a level
of abstraction between that of a source code debugger and that of a
typical algorithm animation
- Our system needs to be exciting enough that first year
students will want to use it, and easy enough to master that it will
not require the removal of any content from the first year CS course.
Students sometimes have a mental model of what is going on when their
program executes that is incorrect. Properly used, visual scaffolding
will let students see exactly what is happening. We think this will
help all students. It may be especially helpful for students who
struggle with coding and abstraction. This latter group often
includes some members of underrepresented minorities who drop out of
CS after one course.
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