Using Visualization to Teach an Introductory Programming Course with Python

Abstract

More and more colleges have offered introductory programming courses for students from different majors, aiming to cultivate students' computational thinking skills. However, teaching introductory programming courses, especially to freshmen, remains a challenging endeavor despite a lot of research and experiments. In this paper we presented our innovative teaching strategy and its implementation both with the utilization of visualization in an introductory Python programming course. The results from our comparative teaching experiments show that visualization could benefit students a lot in learning Python programming and improving their computational thinking abilities.