Integrated development environment for program logic formulation

Abstract

Programmers translate the way people do to  solve problems into programs. By doing so,good logic formulation is a must. The study  aimed to develop an Integrated DevelopmentEnvironment (IDE) for Program Logic  Formulation to enhance students' skills in  programming through flowcharting.  The IDE was designed to include tools for  creating and editing flowchart, checkingprogram logic and expressions, debugging, and  maintaining the database of programmingproblems. The IDE's interface was partitioned  into several sized windows in which all toolsare contained and labelled. The design used  icons for flowchart symbols where any one ofthese can be clicked and dragged into the  provided workspace, file functions such as new,save, save as, cut, copy, paste, delete, and print,  and translator functions such as compile and  debug. The translators in the developed system  are the compile and debug modules. Thecompile module checks the expressions and  operations on the flowchart symbols. If there iserror found in the symbols, it produces one  from any of the three messages: The flowchartis syntactically correct, the program produces  the correct logic, and it produces wrong output.The debug module examines each symbol from  start until end symbol in the flowchart. Thereare two programs running simultaneously: C#  (.cs) file and the IDE itself. Behind the scene,the IDE creates a .cs file consisting of  equivalent C# statements for each flowchartsymbol and other C# statements to make the  program complete for execution. Each C#output for process and output symbols is  displayed and read on the console commandand passes it back to the IDE's Debug window.  This IDE was tested for its functionality and  reliability to determine correct flowchart andlogic.  Testing results showed that the IDE provides a  working environment where students cancreate, save, open, edit, and print flowcharts as  well as check program expression and logic.Based on the results of the evaluation  conducted, the developed system gained anoverall mean of 4.62 with a descriptive rating  of Excellent, which indicates that the softwarematerial can be a useful tool in training and  enhancing the students' skills in logicformulation.