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RecurTutor: An Interactive Tutorial for Learning Recursion

Authors:

Stephen H. Edwards,

Hicham G. Elmongui,

Jeremy V. Ernst,

Clifford A. ShafferAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), Volume 19, Issue 1

Article No.: 1, Pages 1 - 25

https://doi.org/10.1145/3218328

Published: 19 November 2018 Publication History

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Abstract

Recursion is one of the most important and hardest topics in lower division computer science courses. As it is an advanced programming skill, the best way to learn it is through targeted practice exercises. But the best practice problems are time consuming to manually grade by an instructor. As a consequence, students historically have completed only a small number of recursion programming exercises as part of their coursework. We present a new way for teaching such programming skills. Students view examples and visualizations, then practice a wide variety of automatically assessed, small-scale programming exercises that address the sub-skills required to learn recursion. The basic recursion tutorial (RecurTutor) teaches material typically encountered in CS2 courses. Students who used RecurTutor had significantly better grades on recursion exam questions than did students who used typical instruction. Students who experienced RecurTutor spent significantly more time on solving recursive programming exercises than students who experienced typical instruction, and came out with a significantly higher confidence level.

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Cited By

TOPSAKAL O(2023)Teaching Algorithms Design Approaches via Interactive Jupyter NotebooksEuropean Journal of Technic10.36222/ejt.1320404Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.36222/ejt.1320404
Muldner KJennings JChiarelli V(2022)A Review of Worked Examples in Programming ActivitiesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/356026623:1(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3560266
Cazalas J(2020)Recursion refinedJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3381569.338158535:3(134-142)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3381569.3381585
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Index Terms

RecurTutor: An Interactive Tutorial for Learning Recursion
1. Applied computing
  1. Education
    1. E-learning

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cover image ACM Transactions on Computing Education

ACM Transactions on Computing Education Volume 19, Issue 1

March 2019

156 pages

EISSN:1946-6226

DOI:10.1145/3282284

Editor:
Chris Hundhausen
Washington State University, USA

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Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 November 2018

Accepted: 01 February 2018

Revised: 01 October 2017

Received: 01 July 2016

Published in TOCE Volume 19, Issue 1

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Cited By

TOPSAKAL O(2023)Teaching Algorithms Design Approaches via Interactive Jupyter NotebooksEuropean Journal of Technic10.36222/ejt.1320404Online publication date: 30-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.36222/ejt.1320404
Muldner KJennings JChiarelli V(2022)A Review of Worked Examples in Programming ActivitiesACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/356026623:1(1-35)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3560266
Cazalas J(2020)Recursion refinedJournal of Computing Sciences in Colleges10.5555/3381569.338158535:3(134-142)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3381569.3381585
Nathasya RKarnalim OAyub M(2019)Integrating program and algorithm visualisation for learning data structure implementationEgyptian Informatics Journal10.1016/j.eij.2019.05.001Online publication date: May-2019
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eij.2019.05.001

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