CS1 assessment using memory diagrams

Holliday, Mark A.; Luginbuhl, David

doi:10.1145/1028174.971373

Cited by 9 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…In this study, students' drawings depict various aspects of imperative program execution, but no OO concepts; students' drawings are analyzed to see if certain element types occur with good tracing performance. Holliday and Luginbuhl [2004] developed a diagram type, a so-called memory diagram, to describe objects and method invocations, used it in programming education, and studied students' use of the diagram. A memory diagram describes the state of program execution at a certain point of time.…”

Section: Visualization Of Program Statementioning

confidence: 99%

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

Sajaniemi

Kuittinen

Tikansalo

2008

J. Educ. Resour. Comput.

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Students' understanding of object-oriented (OO) program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing tasks were given at different phases of an elementary OO programming course where two animation tools were used for program visualization. The drawings were analyzed for their overall approaches and their detailed contents.There was a large variability in the overall approaches and the popularity of various approaches changed during the course. The results indicate that students' mental representations of OO concepts and program execution not only grow as new material is covered in teaching, but they also change. The first drawings treat methods as having primarily a static existence; later methods are seen as dynamic invocations that call each other. The role of classes in program execution fluctuates during learning, indicating problems in locating the notion of class with respect to, for example, objects. Two major sources of problems that manifested in many different forms were the relationship between object and method, and the role of the main method with respect to program state. Other problems were caused by overly simplistic understanding of object identification and improper use of application domain knowledge. ACM Reference Format:Sajaniemi, J., Kuittinen, M., and Tikansalo, T. 2008. A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course. ACM

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Section: Visualization Of Program Statementioning

confidence: 99%

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

Sajaniemi

Kuittinen

Tikansalo

2008

J. Educ. Resour. Comput.

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show abstract

“…Holliday and Luginbuhl [11] developed a diagram type, so called memory diagram, to describe objects and method invocations, used it in programming education, and studied students' use of the diagram. A memory diagram describes the state of program execution at a certain point of time.…”

Section: Visualization Of Program Statementioning

confidence: 99%

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

Sajaniemi

Kuittinen

Tikansalo

2007

Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Computing Education Research

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Students' understanding of object-oriented program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing tasks were given at different phases of an elementary OO programming course where two animation tools were used for program visualization. The drawings were analyzed for their overall approaches and their detailed contents.There was a large variability in the overall approaches and the popularity of various approaches changed during the course. The results indicate that students' mental representations of OO concepts and program execution do not only grow as new material is covered in teaching, but they do also change. The first drawings treat methods as having primarily a static existence; later methods are seen as dynamic invocations that call each other. The role of classes in program execution fluctuates during learning indicating problems in locating the notion of class with respect to, e.g., objects. Two major sources of problems that manifested in many different forms were the relationship between object and method, and the role of the main method with respect to program state. Other problems were caused by too simplistic understanding of object identification and improper use of application domain knowledge.

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“…Research has offered educators various pedagogic tricks (e.g., Bennedsen & Caspersen, 2004;Bierre, Ventura, Phelps, & Egert 2006;S. Cooper, Dann, & Pausch, 2003;Holliday & Luginbuhl, 2004;Hsia, Simpson, Smith, & Cartwright, 2005;Kölling & Henriksen, 2005;Lopez-Herrejon & Schulman, 2004;Mahmoud, Dobosiewicz, & Swayne, 2004;Marrero & Settle, 2005;Shanmugasundaram, Juell, & Hill, 2006;Truong, Bancroft, & Roe, 2005;Utting, 2006), but the lack of solid psychological and educational theories makes a holistic approach impossible. This paper presents a case for systematic research into the comprehension of programming and the development of skills in the OO paradigm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Procedures to Objects: A Research Agenda for the Psychology of Object-Oriented Programming Education

Sajaniemi¹,

Kuittinen²

2008

Human Technology

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CS1 assessment using memory diagrams

Cited by 9 publications

References 12 publications

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

From Procedures to Objects: A Research Agenda for the Psychology of Object-Oriented Programming Education

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