The state of play: a notional machine for learning programming

Abstract

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a new notional machine design and implementation to help with understanding of programming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The notional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. We introduce the notional machine and a graphical notation for its representation. We also present Novis, an implementation of a dynamic real-time visualiser of this notional machine, integrated into BlueJ.