Carlos de Backer

The design and pilot evaluation of an interactive learning environment for introductory programming influenced by cognitive load theory and constructivism

This article presents the architecture and evaluation of a novel environment for programming education. The design of this programming environment, and the way it is used in class, is based on the findings of constructivist and cognitivist learning paradigms. The environment is evaluated based on qualitative student and teacher evaluations and experiments performed over a three year timespan. As the findings show, the students and teachers see the environment and the way it is used as an invaluable part of their education, and the experiments show that the environment can help with understanding programming concepts that most students consider very difficult.

A Cognitive Model of Programming Knowledge for Procedural Languages

Recently many studies focusing on diverse aspects of programming knowledge were published. However, none of them proposes a complete model in which the contents and overall structure are defined. One of the first (and only) attempts to define such a model was made by Shneiderman, where he defines Programming Knowledge to contain two distinct knowledge bodies. We complement this model by defining the link between the syntactic and semantic knowledge. This link is constituted by the Semantically Augmented Programming Primitives (SAPPs). The paper is concerned in the definition of this ‘missing link’ in programming knowledge.

Rationale Behind the Design of the EduVisor Software Visualization Component

The EduVisor software visualization component is a new pedagogical tool specifically developed to address some wide-spread problems in teaching object-oriented technology to novice programmers. The visualization tool is integrated in a world-class IDE, and shows the students the structure of their own creations at runtime. EduVisor is based on a solid grounding in literature and over 25 years of combined experience in teaching a CS1 course. With this component we have set the goal of helping our students progress faster through the most difficult initial stages of programming.

Components for a pervasive information dissemination architecture

In this paper we explore the requirements of pervasive information dissemination architectures. We identify five critical components that should be present in such a system - the real-virtual bridge, the data representation component, the information presentation component, the security component and the middleware - and provide an overview of the various implementation options. We also present our current proof-ofconcept system including the choices we have made with regard to the five components. Using cheap RFID tags and readers, stock PDA¿s and an ontology-based back-end, this proof-of-concept implementation represents a low-cost and realistic pervasive campus information system. The goal of this paper is to spark discussion as to the suitability of this architecture as a pervasive education environment.