Evaluations of JaguarCode: A web-based object-oriented programming environment with static and dynamic visualization

Abstract

To increase program comprehension and overcome learning obstacles of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), various visualization techniques have been adopted in educational OOP environments. Some provide software development with visual notations without source code, while others support programming with visual aids. Our research supports Java programming along with UML diagrams (class, object, and sequence) and dynamic execution traces of program synchronized in a web-based programming environment - JaguarCode. It aims to help students better understand the static structure and dynamic behavior of Java programs, as well as object-oriented design concepts. This paper reports on the evaluation results of JaguarCode to investigate its effectiveness and user satisfaction through quantitative and qualitative experiments. The experimental results revealed that having both static and dynamic visualizations did positively impact the correctness of program understanding and tracing problems, while the visual representations did affect students' understanding on the program execution of the problems to higher accuracy. It was also observed that students were satisfied with the aspects of those visualizations provided in JaguarCode.