Abstract:

Computer programming is one of the main and much complicated parts of computer science. Learning and teaching programming contains serious problems. Most students face many problems while learning programming. Teaching Experience and research also show the fail of many students in programming courses, instructors should also have proper perspective and a precise plan for teaching programming. Learning how to program requires knowledge, strategy, practical skills, and support of efficient educational tools. Over the past two decades, there have been a number of program visualization (PV) tools designed to enhance teaching and learning programming. In this paper, program visualization tools and their features that could be effective in learning programming for beginners have been analyzed. This paper also contains PVs Tools that are very useful in supporting novice programmers, facility to construct programs from graphical representation of blocks of code and interaction with dynamic and static structures. The results of this study could be useful for professors, novice programmers, and developers of such tools.

Keywords:

Program Visualization, Computer Programming, Learning, Teaching.