A system for program visualization in the classroom
Raghvinder S. Sangwan, James F. Korsh, Paul S. LaFollette · 1998
This paper describes the use of a system which will allow effortless visualization and animation of standard C/C++ piogrhms.tie system brings alive programs so.that students in CS 1 and CS 2 classes can more easily see each instruction and its effects.They can also see the effects of larger entities such as functions.The system serves as an excellent instructional tool and debugger.introduction " Conventional programming environments provide some support 'for program 'understanding, development, and debugging.Once .aprogram is syntactically correct, a student can use a debugger to monitor the Values of variables and step through a program's instructions.Although very useful, this-,process can be quite,involved A-. and laborious.1 The feedback a programmer receives does not provide an over+1 v&w of the program's behavior.It is more instructive to display the dynamics of a program rather than static snapshots of data structure values that are constantly Updated as program instructions are executed.Software visualization systems ,allow custom animations that attempt $0 capture these dynamics [l].Such systems generally require the writing of animation code ' and understanding of the, program one is trying to animate.The aim of our system is to provide automatic animations that are useful and require no additional coding and may lead to understanding of the underlying algorithm.One area, for instance, which has been identified as particularly troublesome for students is parameter passing [2].