ABSTRACT
Early programming experiences often set the threshold for making or breaking future software development professionals. Current software development requires programmers' thorough understanding of modern programming concepts that are multi-tiered and that require a high level of abstractions. While these concepts may have taken years to evolve we require our undergraduate students to grasp them within the first two years of their studies. Fortunately modern software development platforms, such as Dot Net, offer easy to use IDE, readily available libraries, easy connectivity to databases as well as access to multimedia capabilities. Programming instructors can easily incorporate these tools to making intricate and abstract programming concepts appear natural and simple for our students to grasp.The author has experimented with using simple GDI+ provided by Dot Net to illustrate programming abstraction with concrete representations. Common to these programs are graphical demonstrations of intricate programming concepts and/or algorithms, such as sort routines, classes verses objects, inheritance, interface, recursion, threading and multi-threading, events and delegates, etc. Most can be converted or extended to a one- to two-week lab/homework assignment. When students visualize in "actions" what they have programmed, they are more readily inclined to associate concepts with application. "A picture is worth a thousand words", definitely applies here; especially when the "picture" they have created appears in "motion" and is fascinating to view.
- Mandelbrot, B., The Fractal Geometry of Nature, New York, New York, 1983, W. H. Freeman and Company]]Google Scholar
- Stevens, R., Fractal Programming in C, Redwood City, California, 1989, M & T Publishing]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hanan, J., Fracchia, F., Fowler, D., de Boer, M., Mercer, L., The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, New York, New York, 1990, Springer-Verlag]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fergerson, J., Patterson, B., Beres, J., Boutquin, P., Gupta, M., C# Bible, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2002, Wiley Publishing]] Google ScholarDigital Library
- Watson, K., Nagel, C., Pedersen, J., Reid, J., Skinner, M., White, E., Beginning Visual C# 2005, Indianapolis, Indiana, 2005, Wiley Publishing]] Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Integrating visualization to make programming concepts concrete: dot net style
Recommendations
Animation Metaphors for Object-Oriented Concepts
Program visualization and animation has traditionally been done at the level of the programming language and its implementation in a computer. However, novices do not know these concepts and visualizations that build upon programming language ...
An approach to multiparadigm programming database systems
DEXA '96: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems ApplicationsOne way to tackle the impedance mismatch problem is to build multiparadigm programming database systems. The author analyzes a stratified LDL program by partitioning it into modules. It is shown by example that many embedded SQL programs may be ...
Automatic assessment of program visualization exercises
Koli '08: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computing Education ResearchViLLE is a visualization tool for teaching programming to novice programmers. It has an extendable support for multiple programming languages which enables language-independent learning of programming. As a new feature, ViLLE supports automatically ...
Comments