Providing Data Structure Animations in a Lightweight IDE

Hendrix, Dean; Cross, James H.; Jain, Jhilmil; Barowski, Larry A.

doi:10.1016/j.entcs.2007.01.039

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…Four controlled experiments were conducted and the results of all four showed that the data structure viewers in jGRASP had a statistically significant positive effect on student performance [22,23,24]. Specifically, students using the data structure viewers were able to write new code faster and with fewer errors, as well as find and locate more errors in a shorter amount of time.…”

Section: B Dynamic Software Visualization and Animationmentioning

confidence: 95%

Combining Dynamic Program Viewing and Testing in Early Computing Courses

Cross

Hendrix

Barowski

2011

2011 IEEE 35th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

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Dynamic program viewing is a form of visual verification in which a student executes one or more statements in a program and interactively observes the behavior in basic viewers (e.g., an object with its fields) and/or conceptual viewers (e.g., the structural display of binary search tree). This activity can be extremely useful from a program understanding perspective as well as a debugging perspective. In contrast, testing (e.g., with JUnit) provides a way to create persistent test cases and then run and re-run them in an efficient way. We have observed that dynamic program viewing and testing are quite complementary. When test cases are written and executed, dynamic program viewing becomes a valuable aid in traditional debugging as well. Since most test cases are written at the functional level (e.g., did a method return the expected value?), dynamically viewing test methods as they execute can provide students with a deeper level of understanding. The jGRASP IDE has been extended to allow students to combine dynamic program viewing with JUnit testing. In this paper, we discuss both the technical success of this effort and several examples that demonstrate the potential for student use in early computing courses.

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Section: B Dynamic Software Visualization and Animationmentioning

confidence: 95%

Combining Dynamic Program Viewing and Testing in Early Computing Courses

Cross

Hendrix

Barowski

2011

2011 IEEE 35th Annual Computer Software and Applications Conference

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HDPV

Sundararaman

Back

2008

Proceedings of the 4th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization

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Robust Generation of Dynamic Data Structure Visualizations with Multiple Interaction Approaches

Cross

Hendrix

Umphress

et al. 2009

ACM Trans. Comput. Educ.

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jGRASP has three integrated approaches for interacting with its dynamic viewers for data structures: debugger, workbench, and text-based interactions that allow individual Java statements and expressions to be executed/evaluated. These approaches can be used together to provide a complementary set of interactions with the dynamic viewers. Data structure identification and rendering were tested by examining examples from 20 data structure textbooks. Controlled experiments with CS2 students indicate that the viewers can have a significant positive impact on student performance. The overall result is a flexible environment for interacting with effective dynamic data structure visualizations generated by a robust structure identifier.

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Providing Data Structure Animations in a Lightweight IDE

Cited by 4 publications

References 6 publications

Combining Dynamic Program Viewing and Testing in Early Computing Courses

Combining Dynamic Program Viewing and Testing in Early Computing Courses

HDPV

Robust Generation of Dynamic Data Structure Visualizations with Multiple Interaction Approaches

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