Animation and Automatic Evaluation to Support Programming Teaching

Paula Correia Tavares, Pedro Rangel Henriques, Elsa Ferreira Gomes

2015

Abstract

Learning programming is a complex task that poses significant challenges. Students face different kinds of difficulties at complex levels that traditional teaching/learning methods are nor able to cope with. For this reason, several authors have researched the pedagogical effectiveness of program visualization and animation, and developed some tools. Animation can help students on the analysis and understanding of given programs, and can also guide on the development of new ones. Besides that is very important to give students the opportunity to practice solving programming exercises by themselves. Receiving feedback is essential for knowledge acquisition. New tools arose (especially in the area of programming contests) to allow for the submission of solutions (programs developed by the students) to the problem statements presented by the teacher and to assess them, returning immediately information about the submitted answer. These tools can be incorporated into teaching activities, allowing students to test their work getting immediate feedback. Automatic evaluation systems significantly improve students performance. In this article are shown two approaches to the teaching of programming, animation and automatic assessment are reviewed, and a new pedagogical practice resulting from combination of both is proposed.

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Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Correia Tavares P., Rangel Henriques P. and Ferreira Gomes E. (2015). Animation and Automatic Evaluation to Support Programming Teaching . In Doctoral Consortium - DCCSEDU, (CSEDU 2015) ISBN , pages 28-32


in Bibtex Style

@conference{dccsedu15,
author={Paula Correia Tavares and Pedro Rangel Henriques and Elsa Ferreira Gomes},
title={Animation and Automatic Evaluation to Support Programming Teaching},
booktitle={Doctoral Consortium - DCCSEDU, (CSEDU 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={28-32},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={},
isbn={},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Doctoral Consortium - DCCSEDU, (CSEDU 2015)
TI - Animation and Automatic Evaluation to Support Programming Teaching
SN -
AU - Correia Tavares P.
AU - Rangel Henriques P.
AU - Ferreira Gomes E.
PY - 2015
SP - 28
EP - 32
DO -