Combining program visualization with programming workspace to assist students for completing programming laboratory task

Abstract

Numerous Program Visualization tools (PVs) have been developed for assisting novice students to understand their source code further. However, none of them are practical to be used in the context of completing programming laboratory task; students are required to keep switching between PV and programming workspace since PV's features are considerably limited for developing programming solution from scratch. This paper combines PV with programming workspace to handle such issue. Resulted tool (which is named PITON) has 13 features extracted from PythonTutor (a program visualization tool), PyCharm (a programming workspace), and student's feedbacks about PythonTutor. According to think-aloud and user study, PITON is more practical to be used than a combination of PythonTutor and PyCharm. Further, its features are considerably helpful; students rated these features as useful and frequently used.