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How Do Students Use Program Visualizations within an Interactive Ebook?

Published: 09 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We investigated students' use of program visualizations (PVs) that were tightly integrated into the electronic book of an introductory course on programming. A quantitative analysis of logs showed that most students, and beginners especially, used the PVs, even where the PV did not directly affect their grade. Students commonly spent more time studying certain steps than others, suggesting they used the PVs attentively. Nevertheless, substantial numbers of students appeared to gloss over some key animation steps, something that future improvements to pedagogy may address. Overall, the results suggest that integrating PVs into an ebook can promote student engagement and has been fairly successful in the studied context. More research is needed to understand the differences between our results and earlier ones, and to assess the generalizability of our findings.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICER '15: Proceedings of the eleventh annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research
    July 2015
    300 pages
    ISBN:9781450336307
    DOI:10.1145/2787622
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 09 August 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. beginner programmers
    2. cs1
    3. ebooks
    4. program visualization

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    • (2022)Toward a Competence Model for Graphical ModelingACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/356759823:1(1-30)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
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