Animated Examples as Practice Content in a Java Programming Course

Abstract

Code examples are commonly used learning resources that help students grasp various programming structures and concepts. However, example code usually requires explanations about what each line or part of the code does. Otherwise, students may find it difficult to follow an example. In this paper, we compare two types of code examples that use different techniques to describe important concepts in the code: annotated and animated examples. The former displays an explanation for a subset of lines in plain text, whereas the latter visualizes code execution. We studied the use and impact of these enhanced examples, provided as non-mandatory practice content, in three introductory Java courses. Our results suggest that animated examples are more engaging and have a positive impact on students' learning. As compared to annotated examples, students spent more time with animated examples and more likely completed them. Also, a positive relationship was found between the number of explored animated examples and the overall course grade.

Jsvee & Kelmu: Creating and tailoring program animations for computing education

“…In this section, we present new empirical results from 3 studies in which we have used Jsvee and Kelmu together in 2 different CS1 courses at Aalto University. Our previous research 7,8 reports how Jsvee is used in CS1 context without Kelmu annotations, and now, our motivation is to see how the Kelmu annotations change the student behavior.…”

“…Our previous results show that students will voluntarily use Jsvee animations at least in certain CS1 settings. The new empirical results in this article give evidence that augmenting Jsvee animations with Kelmu changes student behavior.…”

“…This also indicates that animations are considered useful. Our another research setting 8 suggests that program animations are more engaging and tend to lead slightly better learning results when compared with traditional annotated code examples with static explanations for each line. These 2 articles provide more detailed evaluation of Jsvee.…”

“…Our previous work of Jsvee [6][7][8] describes the idea and the need for the expression-level visualization and reports results of using Jsvee as a part of materials in CS1 courses. The previous paper about Kelmu 9 addresses the pedagogical need for the Kelmu toolkit and presents how Mayer's multimedia learning principles 10 support the idea of Kelmu.…”

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