OGRE: Three-Dimensional Program Visualization for Novice Programmers

Authors:
Iain Milne;Glenn Rowe
Affiliations:
Department of Applied Computing, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK E-mail: imilne@computing.dundee.ac.uk;Department of Applied Computing, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK E-mail: growe@computing.dundee.ac.uk
Venue:
Education and Information Technologies
Year:
2004

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Abstract

As demonstrated in our earlier paper (Milne and Rowe, 2002), students learning object-oriented programming find topics related to the computer's handling of memory the most difficult to understand. Our results indicated that a visualization of a running object-oriented program, with particular emphasis on the display of how objects are related to each other in memory, would help students to learn these topics.Here we describe OGRE (Object-oriented GRaphical Environment) – a program visualization tool that has been developed to specifically address these memory related issues by providing three-dimensional, interactive visualizations that aid higher-level understanding of a program's execution in memory. OGRE has been evaluated with positive results that show significant improvements in students' understanding of C++'s memory-related topics.