An interactive Web Application Visualizing Memory Space for Novice C Programmers (Abstract Only)

The concept of memory management in C programming language is particularly challenging for novice programmers. Consequently, many researchers have proposed program visualization tools to alleviate these difficulties: for example, SeeC is one of the state-of-the-art tools for visualizing the behavior and execution status of C programs. However, three problems (P1-3) remain in SeeC, as well as in other existing visualization tools. P1 (Usability): SeeC requires many steps to revisualize modified source code. P2 (Capability): SeeC does not fully support dynamic memory allocation. P3 (Installability): novice programmers often find installation of SeeC challenging due to its dependency on Clang. We propose a new visualization tool named PlayVisualizerC (PVC) for novice C programmers, which provides three solutions (S1-3) for P1-3. S1: PVC reduces the steps required for revisualization. S2: complete support for dynamic memory allocation. S3: designed to be installed in the user's web browser. From a small-scale experiment and a questionnaire given to 20 students, we found that a set of four programming tasks were solved 1.8 times faster and 24% more correctly using PVC.