Making the connection

Abstract

In learning to program, students must gain an understanding of how their program works. They need to make a connection between what they have written and what the program actually does. Otherwise, students have trouble figuring out what went wrong when things do not work. One factor that contributes to making this connection is an ability to visualize a program's state and how it changes when the program is executed. In this paper, we present Alice, a 3-D interactive animation environment. Alice provides a graphic visualization of a program's state in an animated small world and thereby supports the beginning programmer in learning to construct and debug programs.