Visualizing programs with Jeliot 3

Abstract

We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.

A Quasi-Experimental Design to Evaluate the Use of PythonTutor on Programming Laboratory Session

“…It usually displays all information stored on a program in a debug-like manner. Jeliot 3 [15], JIVE [16], VILLE [17], and PythonTutor [18] are several examples which fall into this category.…”

Enseñando a programar: un camino directo para desarrollar el pensamiento computacional

“…En el trabajo de Lemieux y Salois (2006) se hace un estudio bastante detallado acerca de las distintas categorías en las que se pueden incluir los diferentes tipos de visualización de software. Jeliot (Ben-Ari, 2001), (Moreno et al, 2004), o SRec (Pérez & Velázquez, 2009) son algunas de las propuestas existentes. La utilización de algún sistema de visualización de programas puede ayudar al alumnado a mejorar su comprensión acerca de la ejecución de un programa.…”

Using Roles of Variables to Enhance Novice's Debugging Work

“…In addition, VILLE has an execution slider with which the user can move to any state in program execution. These are features we have used to see in algorithm animation tools (see, e.g., Moreno et al, 2004;Rößling et al, 2000;Stasko 1997). However, moving backwards in the program execution is usually not possible in debuggers and it is missing from many program visualization tools.…”

“…A whole field of research, software visualization (For an overview, see for example, (Stasko, Domingue, Brown, & Price, 1998) has concentrated on examining and demonstrating program code, its structure, and the execution of code. Its two important subfields are program visualization, in which the focus of activity is on illustrating the dynamic behaviour of actual program code and variable values (see, for example, Jeliot (Moreno, Myller, Sutinen, & Ben-Ari, 2004), DDD (Zeller, 2001), jGrasp (Jain, James, Cross, Hendrix, & Barowski, 2006), and BlueJ (Zeller, 2001), and algorithm animation where the focus is on the visualization of dynamic behaviour of more abstract concepts: data structures and algorithms (see, for example, Animal (Rößling, Schüler, & Freisleben,, 2000), o JHAVE (Naps, Eagan, & Norton,, 2000), JAWAA (Akingbade, Finley, Jackson, Patel, & Rodger, 2003), Samba (Stasko, 1997)). However, many current tools, such as Jeliot, jGRASP, and Animal include features from both of these subfields.…”