The Jeliot 2000 program animation system

  • Authors:
  • Ronit Ben-Bassat Levy;Mordechai Ben-Ari;Pekka A. Uronen

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel;Department of Science Teaching, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot 76100, Israel;Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, FIN-00014 Helsinki, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Education
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Jeliot 2000 is a program animation system intended for teaching introductory computer science to high school students. A program animation system is a system that displays a dynamic graphical representation of the execution of a program. The goal is to help novices understand basic concepts of algorithms and programming like assignment, I/O and control flow, whose dynamic aspects are not easily grasped just by looking at the static representation of an algorithm in a programming language. The paper describes the design and implementation of Jeliot 2000 and an experiment in its use in a year-long course. The experiment showed that animation provides a vocabulary and a concrete model that can improve the learning of students who would otherwise have difficulty with abstract computer-science concepts.