VT-Revolution: Interactive Programming Video Tutorial Authoring and Watching System

Abstract

Procedural knowledge describes actions and manipulations that are carried out to complete programming tasks. An effective way to document procedural knowledge is programming video tutorials. Unlike text-based software artifacts and tutorials that can be effectively searched and linked using information retrieval techniques, the streaming nature of programming videos limits the ways to explore the captured workflows and interact with files, code and program output in the videos. Existing solutions to adding interactive workflow and elements to programming videos have a dilemma between the level of desired interaction and the efforts required for authoring tutorials. In this work, we tackle this dilemma by designing and building a programming video tutorial authoring system that leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming videos, and the corresponding tutorial watching system that enhances the learning experience of video tutorials by providing programming-specific workflow history and timeline-based browsing interactions. Our tutorial authoring system does not incur any additional burden on tutorial authors to make programming videos interactive. Given a programming video accompanied by synchronously-logged workflow history, our tutorial watching system allows tutorial watchers to freely explore the captured workflows and interact with files, code and program output in the tutorial. We conduct a user study of 135 developers to evaluate the design and effectiveness of our system in helping developers learn programming knowledge in video tutorials.