Article

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course

Authors:

Jorma Sajaniemi,

Marja Kuittinen,

Taina TikansaloAuthors Info & Claims

ICER '07: Proceedings of the third international workshop on Computing education research

Pages 1 - 16

https://doi.org/10.1145/1288580.1288582

Published: 15 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Students' understanding of object-oriented program execution was studied by asking students to draw a picture of a program state at a specific moment. Students were given minimal instructions on what to include in their drawings in order to see what they considered to be central concepts and relationships in program execution. Three drawing tasks were given at different phases of an elementary OO programming course where two animation tools were used for program visualization. The drawings were analyzed for their overall approaches and their detailed contents.

There was a large variability in the overall approaches and the popularity of various approaches changed during the course. The results indicate that students' mental representations of OO concepts and program execution do not only grow as new material is covered in teaching, but they do also change. The first drawings treat methods as having primarily a static existence; later methods are seen as dynamic invocations that call each other. The role of classes in program execution fluctuates during learning indicating problems in locating the notion of class with respect to, e.g., objects. Two major sources of problems that manifested in many different forms were the relationship between object and method, and the role of the main method with respect to program state. Other problems were caused by too simplistic understanding of object identification and improper use of application domain knowledge.

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Index Terms

A study of the development of students' visualizations of program state during an elementary object-oriented programming course
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
2. Software and its engineering

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICER '07: Proceedings of the third international workshop on Computing education research

September 2007

172 pages

ISBN:9781595938411

DOI:10.1145/1288580

General Chairs:
Richard Anderson
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
,
Sally Fincher
University of Kent at Canterbury, UK
,
Mark Guzdial
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

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Published: 15 September 2007

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September 15 - 16, 2007

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ICER '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 14 of 24 submissions, 58%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 189 of 803 submissions, 24%

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Whatley DGoldman MMiller R(2021)Snapdown: A Text-Based Snapshot Diagram Language for Programming Education2021 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576201(1-9)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576201
Noa RRonit S(2018)A Diagnostic Tool for Assessing Students’ Perceptions and Misconceptions Regards the Current Object “this”Informatics in Schools. Fundamentals of Computer Science and Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_7(84-100)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02750-6_7
Rajashekharaiah KPawar MPatil MKulenavar NJoshi G(2016)Design Thinking Framework to Enhance Object Oriented Design and Problem Analysis Skill in Java Programming Laboratory: An Experience2016 IEEE 4th International Conference on MOOCs, Innovation and Technology in Education (MITE)10.1109/MITE.2016.048(200-205)Online publication date: Dec-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/MITE.2016.048
Xinogalos S(2015)Object-Oriented Design and ProgrammingACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/270051915:3(1-21)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700519
Bennedsen JSchulte C(2013)Object Interaction Competence Model v. 2.0Proceedings of the 2013 Learning and Teaching in Computing and Engineering10.1109/LaTiCE.2013.43(9-16)Online publication date: 21-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/LaTiCE.2013.43
Schulte CClear TTaherkhani ABusjahn TPaterson J(2010)An introduction to program comprehension for computer science educatorsProceedings of the 2010 ITiCSE working group reports10.1145/1971681.1971687(65-86)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2010
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Kinnunen PMeisalo VMalmi LCaspersen MClancy MSanders K(2010)Have we missed something?Proceedings of the Sixth international workshop on Computing education research10.1145/1839594.1839598(13-22)Online publication date: 9-Aug-2010
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