Initial Evaluation of JaguarCode: A Web-Based Object-Oriented Programming Environment with Static and Dynamic Visualization

Various visualization techniques have been adopted to educational Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) environments. Some provide software development with visual notations without source code, while others support programming with visual aids. Our research supports Java programming along with static UML class diagrams and dynamic execution trace of program synchronized in a webbased programming environment - JaguarCode. It aims to help students better understand static structure and dynamic behavior of Java programs, and object-oriented design concepts. This paper reports on an initial evaluation of JaguarCode to investigate its effectiveness and user satisfaction through quantitative and qualitative experiments. The experimental results revealed that having both static and dynamic visualizations did positively impact the correctness of program understanding and tracing problems, and the visual representations did affect students' understanding on program execution of the problems to higher accuracy. It was also observed that students were satisfied with the aspects of those visualizations provided in JaguarCode.