Interaction support systems between teachers and visual content for effortless creation of program visualization

Several program visualization (PV) systems have been developed to support novice learners in understanding program behavior since last couple of decades. However, only a few have been introduced or continuously used in actual classes. One of the main obstacles to using PV systems in actual classrooms is the significant amount of time needed to integrate them into actual educational settings. We developed a PV system called Teacher’s Explaining Design Visualization Tool (TEDViT) and introduced it into several practical applications. Although programming learning with TEDViT had a noticeable effect, the time required for PV customization (i.e., the time consumed for interactions between teachers and PV content) was a non-trivial problem. In this study, we describe three approaches to reduce the time cost of customizing by teachers; that is, we supported PV creation by (1) semi-automatically arranging drawing objects oriented toward novice learners, (2) allowing menu operations with a dialog interface, and (3) providing visual information and visual operations using a WYSIWYG PV editor. We developed three individual systems based on each approach and evaluated their effortlessness by measuring the time required for actual PV creation. The evaluation results suggest that each of the three approaches has a certain effect on improving the effortlessness of PV creation. This study describes our three approaches and the system developed based on them and discusses the possibility of integrating them.