Redesigning the Animation Capabilities of a Functional Programming Environment under an Educational Framework

Animation systems not only should be built on technical basis (e.g. a programming model for execution) but also centered on their user. This is particularly important in most current animation systems, which are used for educational use. WinHIPE is a programming environment for functional programming that provides visualization and animation capabilities for expression evaluation. It was designed for education, giving a simple interaction based on the office metaphor. In this paper, we present a systematic redesign of WinHIPE capabilities that takes into consideration three dimensions: a model of program execution, a model of program visualization/animation, and support to build and maintain animations. The last dimension is based on a metaphor of animations as office documents. In addition, Anderson and Naps’ framework is used to assess and refine the animation capabilities of the system for education. After this redesign, the usability of WinHIPE for educators and students has been enhanced in a systematic way.

Proceedings of the 2nd Program Visualization Workshop. DAIMI Report Series, 59-68

Electronic books for programming education: a review and future prospects

Programming is a suitable field to design electronic books with a laboratory component, where the programming task is exercised in the theoretical context provided by the book. The goal of the paper is to make a review of current electronic books for programming education and identify future lines of research. First, we review a number of software tools and electronic books for programming education in order to give a broad vision of technological opportunities in programming education. Later, a comparative analysis of such electronic books is made. Finally, based on this overview and analysis, we identify aspects that either are currently poorly supported or are a subject of active research, thus constituting potential areas for future improvement.

R. Martínez-Unanue, M. Paredes-Velasco, C. Pareja-Flores, J. Urquiza-Fuentes, and J. Á. Velázquez-Iturbide. 2002. Electronic books for programming education: a review and future prospects. In Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education (ITiCSE ’02). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 34-38. DOI=10.1145/544414.544426