Abstract thinking description system for programming education facilitation

Abstract

Programming courses in universities generally teach how to solve problems. However, there are many beginners who fail to make programming well. This is because the beginners cannot be aware of abstract thinking related to the structure of the program, and cannot share abstract thinking with their instructors. In this paper, we propose a method to describe the structure of a program with native language comments in the code tree view and to simply change the structure of the program and the source code by drag-and-drop operation in the code-tree. With this method, beginners can easily organize their thoughts, and instructors can understand the level of understanding and thinking of beginners. We constructed a prototype system using our proposed method. The experiment indicated that it was possible to deepen the understanding of the beginners and utilize it for teaching.