Teaching Visualization-first for Novices to Understand Programming

Abstract

Teaching computer programming is always thought to be “hard” and a challenge. In order to reduce novice's cognitive load, this research aimed to explore how teaching, employing the integration of variable and visualization would impact the performance of novices' learning outcomes in computer programming. The proposed experimental method provides visualization-first at both design and implement level, which was evaluated through a survey and comparison of performance from two group students. The contribution of this research is that we have successfully employed the debugger from the programming IDE for visualization of both variables and coding. Through the visualization-first method, students also learned debugging and testing at the early stage of programming, which contributes to build up fundamental skills for them towards further study.