Active Visual Scaffolding by Charles Kelemen and Eugene Turk
This is very much a WORK IN PROGRESS.
Good things
- bad code is reflected in the animation
- works with jdb as well as jdb works
Issues
- How much should student have to do?
- How much can we do?
Conclusions
- Utilizing the relatively new Java2d API, we believe we can
provide students with an easy to use visual scaffolding infrastructure so that they
can think about issues of algorithm understanding and program
correctness, while using visual scaffolding in code development.
- Constructing the
visualization will force students to come to grips with both the
forest and the trees. Deciding what features to illustrate will force
students to abstract away from lines of code and individual values to
data structures and algorithms.
- The bridge between concrete and abstract built
in visual scaffolding will be especially helpful to students coming to
CS material for the first time.