Visual representations for recursion

✍ Scribed by SHO-HUAN TUNG; CHING-TAO CHANG; WING-KWONG WONG; JIHN-CHANG JEHNG

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 453 KB
• Volume: 54
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1071-5819
• DOI: 10.1006/ijhc.2000.0433

✦ Synopsis

Visualcode is a visual notation that uses coloured expressions and graphical environments to describe the execution of Scheme programs. RainbowScheme is a program visualization system which is designed to produce visualcode representations of step-bystep execution of Scheme programs. This article presents a new approach of teaching recursion using visualcode and RainbowScheme. Experimental evaluation indicates that viewing RainbowScheme-produced visual traces and requiring students to use visualcode to generate visual evaluation steps of recursive programs can enhance the learners' ability to evaluate recursive programs as well as to solve recursive programming problems.

2001 Academic Press