Article

Teaching roles of variables in elementary programming courses

Authors:

Marja Kuittinen,

Jorma SajaniemiAuthors Info & Claims

ITiCSE '04: Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

Pages 57 - 61

https://doi.org/10.1145/1007996.1008014

Published: 28 June 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and new methods and techniques to help novices to learn programming are needed. This paper presents roles of variables as a new concept that can be used to assist in learning and gives detailed instructions on techniques to present roles to novices. These techniques are based on current learning theories and they have been used in a classroom experiment comparing traditional teaching with role-based teaching. The results suggest that the introduction of roles provides students a new conceptual framework that enables them to mentally process programs in a way similar to that of good code comprehenders; the use of role-based animation seems to assist in the adoption of role knowledge and expert-like programming skill.

References

[1]

J. R. Anderson. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. Worth Publishers, 5th edition, 2000.

[2]

M. Ben-Ari. Constructivism in computer science education. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, 20(1):45--73, 2001.

Digital Library

[3]

M. Ben-Ari and J. Sajaniemi. Roles of variables as seen by CS educators. In 9th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITICSE'04), 2004.

Digital Library

[4]

C. Bereiter. Constructivism, socioculturalism and Popper's world. Educational Researcher, 23(7):21--23, 1994.

[5]

M. J. Clancy and M. C. Linn. Patterns and pedagogy. In Proc. of the 30th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education, volume 31(1) of ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, pages 37--42, 1999.

Digital Library

[6]

F. Détienne. Software Design-Cognitive Aspects. Springer-Verlag, 2002.

Digital Library

[7]

A. E. Fleury. Parameter passing: The rules the students construct. In Proc. of the 22nd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education, volume 23(1) of ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, pages 283--286, 1991.

Digital Library

[8]

J. Good and P. Brna. Toward authentic measures of program comprehension. In EASE and PPIG 2003, Papers from the Joint Conference at Keele University, pages 29--49, 2003.

[9]

S. Holland, R. Griffiths, and M. Woodman. Avoiding object misconceptions. In Proc. of the 28th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education, volume 29(1) of ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, pages 131--134, 1997.

Digital Library

[10]

C. D. Hundhausen, S. A. Douglas, and J. T. Stasko. A meta-study of algorithm visualization effectiveness. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 13:259--290, 2002.

[11]

S. K. Madison. A Study of College Students' Construct of Parameter Passing: Implications for Instruction. PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1995.

Digital Library

[12]

P. Mulholland and M. Eisenstadt. Using software to teach programming: Past, present and future. In J. Stasko, J. Domingue, M. H. Brown, and B. A. Price, editors, Software Visualization -- Programming as a Multimedia Experience, pages 399--408. The MIT Press, 1998.

[13]

D. Nguyen. Design patterns for data structures. In Proc. of the 29th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on CS Education, volume 30(1) of ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, pages 336--340, 1998.

Digital Library

[14]

N. Pennington. Comprehension strategies in programming. In G. M. Olson, S. Sheppard, and E. Soloway, editors, Empirical Studies of Programmers: Second Workshop, pages 100--113. Ablex Publishing Company, 1987.

Digital Library

[15]

J. Sajaniemi. An empirical analysis of roles of variables in novice-level procedural programs. In Proceedings of IEEE 2002 Symposia on Human Centric Computing Languages and Environments (HCC'02), pages 37--39. IEEE Computer Society, 2002.

Digital Library

[16]

J. Sajaniemi. Roles of variables home page. http://www.cs.joensuu.fi/~saja/var_roles/, 2003. (Accessed Nov. 12th, 2003).

[17]

J. Sajaniemi and M. Kuittinen. Program animation based on the roles of variables. In Proc. of ACM 2003 Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis 2003), pages 7--16. Association for Computing Machinery, 2003.

Digital Library

[18]

J. Sajaniemi and M. Kuittinen. An experiment on using roles of variables in teaching introductory programming. Computer Science Education, In press.

[19]

R. Samurcay. The concept of variable in programming: Its meaning and use in problem-solving by novice programmers. In E. Soloway and J. C. Spohrer, editors, Studying the Novice Programmer, pages 161--178. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1989.

[20]

D. Sleeman, R. T. Putnam, J. A. Baxter, and L. Kuspa. A summary of misconceptions of high school Basic programmers. In E. Soloway and J. C. Spohrer, editors, Studying the Novice Programmer, pages 301--314. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ, 1989.

[21]

E. von Glasersfeld. A constructivist approach to teaching. In P. Steffe and J. Gale, editors, Constructivism in Education, pages 3--15. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale (NJ), 1995.

[22]

E. Wallingford. The elementary patterns home page. http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/patterns/elementary/, 2003. (Accessed Nov. 12th, 2003).

Cited By

Demirtaş MFowler MHu NCunningham K(2024)Validating, Refining, and Identifying Programming Plans Using Learning Curve Analysis on Code Writing DataProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671120(263-279)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632620.3671120
Sane AValadi JChoppella VPhatak DLuxton-Reilly ACraig M(2023)Teaching Programmers to Think of Program DynamicsProceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education Vol 110.1145/3576882.3617918(140-146)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576882.3617918
Hassan MCunningham KZilles C(2023)Evaluating Beacons, the Role of Variables, Tracing, and Abstract Tracing for Teaching Novices to Understand Program IntentProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600140(329-343)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568813.3600140
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Teaching roles of variables in elementary programming courses
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing education
      1. Computing education programs
        Computer science education
2. Software and its engineering

Recommendations

Program animation based on the roles of variables
SoftVis '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and visualizations may be used to foster learning. This paper presents a program animation system, PlanAni, that is based on the concept of the roles of variables. Roles represent schematic ...
Roles of variables and programming skills improvement

Roles of variables capture tacit expert knowledge in a form that can be taught in introductory programming courses. A role describes some stereotypic use of variables, and only ten roles are needed to cover 99% of all variables in novice-level programs. ...
Teaching roles of variables in elementary programming courses

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and new methods and techniques to help novices to learn programming are needed. This paper presents roles of variables as a new concept that can be used to assist in learning and gives detailed ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ITiCSE '04: Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education

June 2004

296 pages

ISBN:1581138369

DOI:10.1145/1007996

Conference Chair:
Roger Boyle
University of Leeds, UK
,
Program Chairs:
Martyn Clark
University of Leeds, UK
,
Amruth Kumar
Ramapo College of NJ

ACM SIGCSE Bulletin Volume 36, Issue 3
September 2004
280 pages
ISSN:0097-8418
DOI:10.1145/1026487
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2004 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]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 28 June 2004

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

ITiCSE04

Sponsor:

ITiCSE04: Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

June 28 - 30, 2004

Leeds, United Kingdom

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

42
Total Citations
View Citations
1,616
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)21
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 31 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Demirtaş MFowler MHu NCunningham K(2024)Validating, Refining, and Identifying Programming Plans Using Learning Curve Analysis on Code Writing DataProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671120(263-279)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3632620.3671120
Sane AValadi JChoppella VPhatak DLuxton-Reilly ACraig M(2023)Teaching Programmers to Think of Program DynamicsProceedings of the ACM Conference on Global Computing Education Vol 110.1145/3576882.3617918(140-146)Online publication date: 5-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576882.3617918
Hassan MCunningham KZilles C(2023)Evaluating Beacons, the Role of Variables, Tracing, and Abstract Tracing for Teaching Novices to Understand Program IntentProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3568813.3600140(329-343)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3568813.3600140
Luo FYan WLiu RIsrael MMerkle LDoyle MSheard JSoh LDorn B(2022)Elementary Students' Understanding of Variables in Computational Thinking-Integrated InstructionProceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - Volume 110.1145/3478431.3499323(523-529)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3478431.3499323
Iyer VZilles CSherriff MMerkle LCutter PMonge ASheard J(2021)Pattern Census: A Characterization of Pattern Usage in Early Programming CoursesProceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3408877.3432442(45-51)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3408877.3432442
Israel-Fishelson RHershkovitz A(2020)Shooting for the StarsEarly Warning Systems and Targeted Interventions for Student Success in Online Courses10.4018/978-1-7998-5074-8.ch012(239-258)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-7998-5074-8.ch012
Federici SSergi EMedas CLussu RGola EZuncheddu A(2020)Computational Pedagogy: Block Programming as a General Learning ToolComputer Supported Education10.1007/978-3-030-58459-7_11(211-235)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58459-7_11
Israel-Fishelson RHershkovitz A(2019)Persistence in a Game-Based Learning Environment: The Case of Elementary School Students Learning Computational ThinkingJournal of Educational Computing Research10.1177/073563311988718758:5(891-918)Online publication date: 15-Nov-2019
https://doi.org/10.1177/0735633119887187
Izu CSchulte CAggarwal ACutts QDuran RGutica MHeinemann BKraemer ELonati VMirolo CWeeda RRößling GGiannakos MScharlau BMcDermott RPears ASabin M(2019)Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers - Learning Activities and Learning TrajectoriesProceedings of the Working Group Reports on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3344429.3372501(27-52)Online publication date: 18-Dec-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3344429.3372501
Mirolo C(2014)A Present-Day “Glass Bead Game”: A Framework for the Education of Prospective Informatics Teachers Inspired by a Reflection on the Nature of the DisciplineInformatics in Schools. Teaching and Learning Perspectives10.1007/978-3-319-09958-3_13(138-149)Online publication date: 2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09958-3_13
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents