An Educational Practice Using a Code Reading Support Environment for Understanding Nested Loop

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a code reading support environment and a classroom practice using our system for understanding of nested loop. In our preceding work, we had practiced an exercise class in nested loop with a code reading support environment. The evaluation results suggested that students could obtain an expected learning effect roughly by using our system. However, we also found some of them had reached a learning impasse in the classroom. We tried to cope with them, based on two supporting approaches; to bridge a gap between generalization structures of program code and corresponding operations, and to make students capable of predicting the behavior of the nested loop. We extended the preceding system with some new functions according to our approaches, and practiced renewed exercise class in nested loop with our system. The evaluation results suggest that our new system has a certain correlation with understanding of nested loop.