VT-revolution: interactive programming tutorials made possible

Abstract

Programming video tutorials showcase programming tasks and associated workflows. Although video tutorials are easy to create, it is often difficult to explore the captured workflows and interact with the programs in the videos. In this work, we propose a tool named VTRevolution -- an interactive programming video tutorial authoring system. VTRevolution has two components: 1) a tutorial authoring system leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming video tutorials; 2) a tutorial watching system enhances the learning experience of video tutorials by providing operation history and timeline-based browsing interactions. Our tutorial authoring system does not require any special recording tools or instrumentation of target applications. Neither does it incur any additional burden on tutorial authors to add interactions to video tutorials. Given a video tutorial enriched with synchronously-logged workflow history, our tutorial watching system allows tutorial watchers to explore the captured workflows and interact with files and code in a way that is impossible for video data alone. We conduct a user study of 90 developers to evaluate the design and effectiveness of our system in helping developers learn programming knowledge in video tutorials.