Lessons Learned: Use of Interactive Graphics to Support Contextualized Programming Education

Abstract

Learn to program is a difficult task that requires to be highly motivated to get confronted to abstract and complex problems and thus several teaching strategies have been proposed to assist students on how to grasp the intricacies of methods, structures, and algorithms involved in programming. One of these strategies is teaching programming in a contextualized manner through the use of interactive graphics to provide visual aids for the easy understanding and learning of some basic programming concepts. The use of interactive graphics offers immediate feedback to students on the concepts they are learning, in an entertained and contextualized way, through their active participation through the creation of images and figures that they can manipulate. This paper discusses the experiences of the authors in the use of strategies to facilitate the learning of programming structures in a contextualized learning environment, supported by the use of interactive graphics as a means to increase their comprehension and the interest of students. The discussion includes the use of SVG graphics and two environments developed by the authors to provide contextualized learning.