A Learning Support System for Visualizing Behaviors of Students’ Programs Based on Teachers’ Intents of Instruction

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a learning support system for visualizing the behaviors of students’ programs and discuss classroom practices utilizing the system. Up to present, we have held several classes using a program visualization system called TEDViT, which visualizes the behaviors of teachers’ programs based on teachers’ intents of instruction. However, TEDViT does not support visualization of students’ own programs; hence, learners can only observe the behaviors of a given teacher’s program. In this study, we extended TEDViT to be capable of visualizing learners’ own programs in a drawing style that reflects the teacher’s intent of instruction. We introduced the extended TEDViT into three classes and evaluated the robustness and usefulness of the visualizations of learners’ programs. We designed an improvement for our extended TEDViT based on knowledge derived from these practices. The evaluation results suggested that the extended TEDViT’s visualizations have a certain degree of robustness and that our approach has some validity.