The Development Of Synergetic Programming Vusualization Tool For Novice Programming

Prof Dr Nanna, Suryana Herman and Prof Madya Dr Sazilah, Salam and Mohd Sanusi, Azmi and Affandy, . (2011) The Development Of Synergetic Programming Vusualization Tool For Novice Programming. Project Report. UTeM, Melaka, Malaysia. (Submitted)

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Abstract

Learning to program is considered as a complex process that requires in practical manner both cognitive learning in conceptual perspective and skill performance. There is a mutual dependency between both of them; and tends to be an overlapping tasks, none of them should be take apart from the others. Novice students need also to understand the complex representation of the program that spread from machine language into higher-level abstraction for the human reader. Overwhelmed novice students, which have no experiences in programming, have to deal with all these task once. We analyzed some visualization tools and found that mostly these tools useful in only one or two aspects of the programming framework rather than comprehensive stages of programming with multi level of representations. Our survey results concluded that during the development of the program model, participants could only possess static elements of the mental model that are micro-structure and macrostructure of the program text but unable to obtaining the dynamic element of the program trough chunking and cross-referencing mechanisms. These facts lead us to focus our attention on abstraction ability. However, since Jearn to think abstractly is very difficult, we propose a model that can help us to construct a learning-aid tool that will reveal the multi-representation of the program. Proposed model supports comprehensive programming-related tasks that represent program in multi-level abstraction with immediate semantic feedback in an integrated environment. The tool is intended to shift the internal working memory load of students and to provide more "space" to the essential knowledge of programming and it be expected to shed light on the program understanding of our novice students as well.

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