Teaching and viewing recursion as delegation
Jeffrey Edgington · Journal of computing sciences in colleges · 2007
We present an effective way to teach recursion which we believe nearly anyone can understand. Most people are familiar with the concept of someone delegating a task to another person. Our method is based on this idea and presents recursion as a particular form of task delegation. This simple form of delegation is similar to the Little People metaphor. We then extend this form to a more general description of task delegation. We believe that this extension improves understanding of how to program recursive procedures (especially by end-users and novice programmers). Finally we discuss the initial design of a recursion visualization based on task delegation for the Greenfoot programming environment.