The State Of Play: A Notional Machine for Learning Programming

TY - CHAP

T1 - The State Of Play: A Notional Machine for Learning Programming

AU - Berry, Michael

AU - Kölling, Michael

PY - 2014/6/6

Y1 - 2014/6/6

N2 - Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine de- sign and implementation to help with understanding of pro- gramming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The no- tional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We in- troduce the notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. We also present Novis, an implementation of a dynamic real-time visualiser of this notional machine, integrated into BlueJ.

AB - Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine de- sign and implementation to help with understanding of pro- gramming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The no- tional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We in- troduce the notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. We also present Novis, an implementation of a dynamic real-time visualiser of this notional machine, integrated into BlueJ.

M3 - Conference paper

BT - The 19th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE 2014)

PB - ACM

ER -