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UUhistle: a software tool for visual program simulation

Published: 28 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

This paper describes UUhistle, a highly interactive program visualization system for introductory programming courses. UUhistle's main novelty is its support for visual program simulation exercises, in which the student takes the role of the computer as executor of a program in order to learn about program dynamics and to demonstrate their understanding. The student needs to predict the steps involved in the execution of a given program and to directly manipulate the elements of a program visualization to show what happens next. Visual program simulation exercises aim to aid learning by promoting a high level of student engagement with visualizations. They are automatically assessable.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Koli Calling '10: Proceedings of the 10th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research
October 2010
125 pages
ISBN:9781450305204
DOI:10.1145/1930464
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 28 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. UUhistle
  2. automatic assessment
  3. engagement
  4. introductory programming
  5. notional machine
  6. program dynamics
  7. program visualization
  8. visual program simulation

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  • Research-article

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Koli Calling '10
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  • FU-BERLIN

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Overall Acceptance Rate 80 of 182 submissions, 44%

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  • (2024)Assessing the Understanding of Expressions: A Qualitative Study of Notional-Machine-Based Exam QuestionsProceedings of the 24th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3699538.3699554(1-12)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2024
  • (2024)Meaningful Highlighting - Improving Educational IDEs to Enhance Code Comprehension for Programming NovicesProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 210.1145/3649405.3659480(846-847)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2024)MemStep: An Interactive Tool for Constructing and Visualizing the Run-Time Memory Layout of Java ProgramsProceedings of the 2024 on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 110.1145/3649217.3653532(541-547)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2024
  • (2024)EasyTracker: A Python Library for Controlling and Inspecting Program ExecutionProceedings of the 2024 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization10.1109/CGO57630.2024.10444823(359-372)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Decades of Striving for Pedagogical and Technological AlignmentProceedings of the 23rd Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research10.1145/3631802.3631809(1-8)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2023
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  • (2023)Generating Pedagogical Questions to Help Students LearnAugmented Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems10.1007/978-3-031-32883-1_17(195-208)Online publication date: 22-May-2023
  • (2023)Computing Education Research in FinlandPast, Present and Future of Computing Education Research10.1007/978-3-031-25336-2_16(335-372)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2023
  • (2022)An online tool for easy-to-set-up, visualizer-based, and auto-gradable full tracing exercisesJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3533747.353375037:8(32-41)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2022
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