Program visualization and explanation for novice C programmers

Heinsen Egan, M. and McDonald, C.

Program visualization and natural language explanations of program behaviour have been shown to assist novice programmers with improving their programming knowledge, correcting misunderstandings, and debugging programs. These techniques have been used in several novice-focused debugging systems, but few have been developed for the C programming language - despite it being widely reported as a difficult language for novices. We present robust, maintainable systems for visualizing the memory state and explaining the behaviour of programs written in the standard C programming language.

Cite as: Heinsen Egan, M. and McDonald, C. (2014). Program visualization and explanation for novice C programmers. In Proc. Sixteenth Australasian Computing Education Conference (ACE2014) Auckland, New Zealand. CRPIT, 148. Whalley, J. and D\'Souza, D. Eds., ACS. 51-57

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