Learning Support System Visualizing Behavior of Student Program in Object Oriented Language Based on Teacher's Intent of Instruction

Abstract

This study describes a learning support system developed by extending a system that visualizes program behavior based on teachers’ intent of instruction. The extended system supports functions to visualize concepts specific to object-oriented languages and the behavior of learners’ program code. In our previous studies, we developed a system to visualize the behavior of programs based on teachers’ intent of instruction and conducted several classroom practices. Moreover, considering the trends in the languages used for novice programming education, we attempted to extend the system to provide visualizations that support an understanding of concepts specific to object-oriented languages. Furthermore, to improve student engagement, we extended the system to visualize the behavior of a learner’s program code based on the teacher's intent of instruction. These approaches were evaluated individually to obtain positive results regarding visualization validity and learning effects. However, these studies were completely independent, and it was unclear whether integrating all these functions into a learning environment would increase learner engagement and learning effectiveness. Therefore, in this study, we developed a learning support system that visualizes the behavior of learners’ programs in object-oriented languages based on the teachers’ intent of instruction by integrating all these functions. The system was evaluated based on subjective evaluations by learners in practical classes where it was introduced and implemented, and test results from an evaluation experiment conducted with recruited participants. The evaluation results suggested that although the system’s impact was not uniform across all learners, it proved highly effective for students with insufficient understanding of the programs.