Abstract
In this paper, we present an open-source program visualization tool, Jeliot 3. We discuss the design principles and philosophy that gave rise to this successful e-learning tool and to several other related environments. Beside Jeliot 3, we introduce three different environments, BlueJ, EJE, and JeCo that use Jeliot 3 as a plug-in to allow visualization of the program code. Another system, FADA, is a tool that was derived from Jeliot 3 but serves for different pedagogical goals. A com- munity of users and developers of these projects has been created and supported, that allows for global and iterative improvements of the Jeliot 3 tool. This way, both academic research and feed- back from the user community contribute to the development. We compare the presented approach of the tool development to some of the current tools and we discuss several instances evidencing a particular success.
Highlights
Programming is a skill that, in the present society, becomes often necessary and required in everyday situations: actions such as modifying a piece of text or writing a macro in office software or setting the multimedia system to record a selected television program are just three examples of end-user programming
We introduce Jeliot 3 (Moreno et al, 2004a), a program visualization tool which is especially designed for novices
The paper is organized as follows: we first introduce the concept of open source, and we review a state-of-art of program visualization tools with respect to the openness and extensibility
Summary
Programming is a skill that, in the present society, becomes often necessary and required in everyday situations: actions such as modifying a piece of text or writing a macro in office software or setting the multimedia system to record a selected television program are just three examples of end-user programming. A novice-oriented program visualization tool is used to teach programming concepts, for example, by showing some parts of a program graphically. A number of visualization tools have been developed in previous years; the practical results have been inconclusive (for an analysis, see Hundhausen et al, 2002) It has been pointed out, that these tools are often designed in a uniform fashion (Bednarik et al, 2005), without a contextual sensitivity to task and to learner’s cognitive growth (e.g., Ben-Ari, 2001). The sourcecodes are not distributed along with the tool, the tool does not provide means for easy extensibility, and the community around the tool is restricted We present another philosophy to the development of e-learning tools.
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