Jeliot is a family of program animation systems [1]. It has been successfully used to improve the teaching of intro- ductory programming by supplying a concrete language in which to explain programming structures and concepts [2]. Jeliot 3 [4] retains the novice-oriented GUI and animation display of the previous version, Jeliot 2000. Both versions automatically visualize the execution of user-written Java programs.Jeliot 3 introduces a new kind of design in order to make the system extendable and to add new features [5]. The front-end of system has been replaced by the DynamicJava interpreter, which was instrumented to produce an intermediate code, MCode, describing the program's runtime trace. The MCode trace is then rendered by the graphics back-end. The previous version of Jeliot animated variables, expressions, I/O and static method calls. Jeliot 3 is also capable of animating concepts for object-oriented programming: objects, class inheritance, constructors, method calls, instance fields, and reference semantics of arrays and objects. Jeliot 3 is intended to be a simple tool to be used in different kinds of learning scenarios [3]. It can be used to show and teach the basics of programming during a lecture. The lecturer can explain different concepts and show their corresponding animations with Jeliot. Students may use Jeliot 3 by themselves after the lectures to complete and understand the follow-up assignments related to the concepts learned at the lectures. Jeliot 3 can be used as a tool in interactive laboratory sessions. The visual display of the program can be used to facilitate communications about the errors. It can also support virtual courses, as where Jeliot 3 provides a tool that can assist students when external help is not available. Jeliot 3 is available under the GPL for downloading at http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/jeliot/. We intend to form a community around Jeliot 3, where teachers, students and developers could propose ideas and solutions in order to im- prove Jeliot 3 and the teaching of programming. The forum is available on the website and open for anyone interested. There are also plans for further development, for example, a new tool called JeCo (Jeliot Collaborative) [3] aims to integrate Jeliot 3 into a co-authoring environment where students can develop and visualize their programs together.
More collaborative use of visualizations is taking place in the classrooms due to the introduction of pair programming and collaborative learning as teaching and learning methods. This introduces new challenges to the visualization tools, and thus, research and theory to support the development of collaborative visualization tools is needed. We present an empirical study in which the learning outcomes of students were compared when students were learning in collaboration and using materials which contained visualizations on different engagement levels. Results indicate that the level of engagement has an effect on students' learning results although the difference is not statistically significant. Especially, students without previous knowledge seem to gain more from using visualizations on higher engagement level.
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