Demystifying the Abstractness: Teaching Programming Concepts with Visualization

Abstract

The abstract nature of programming concepts in CS/IT courses causes challenges for undergraduate students to grasp them. Visualization tools can mitigate this challenge by providing a "what you see is what you get"experience. Given the diversity of the tools and the fast pace of software updates, it remains a question to select the best-fit tools that can be of current use for the respective programming concepts. This study aims at providing an assessment and classification of visualization tools based on four defined metrics which suggests a hybrid approach for selecting combination of visualization tools in teaching.