Understanding program behavior is challenging for novice learners. To address this problem, various program visualization systems such as TEDViT have been developed. TEDViT allows teachers to establish drawing rules, ensuring that their intentions are reflected in the visualization results. However, visualizing programs edited by learners using TEDViT has been hindered by its rule notation. In this study, we propose a novel rule designed to accommodate learner-edited programs. Furthermore, we develop a new system based on this rule.

Several studies have been conducted to improve program comprehension through code tracing. However, most of these studies have focused on a single flow of control, with insufficient proposals to support program comprehension of multiple flows of control. It is difficult for novices to trace code with multiple flows in the correct order. In this study, we propose a code trace support environment for letting learners to trace the appropriate flow in execution with synchronization constraints. It also supports the component-based comprehension of synchronization mechanisms in multiple flows. The evaluation experiment confirmed the learning effect of understanding the appropriate order of steps. However, several issues regarding the component-based comprehension have been identified.

This paper describes a learning support system that allows learners to answer code fragments fitting blanks in target program code while observing program visualization (PV), and an evaluation experiment conducted to measure the effectiveness of the system. Most existing PV systems have functions to visualize changes in target domain world caused by each execution of statement and to allow learners to answer questions provided by the system, which is not sufficient in terms of learner engagement. In this study, we extended the PV system developed in our previous study by adding a function to provide fill-in-blank exercise to learners and allow learners to answer it, and a function to visualize the PV according to the learner's answer. The effectiveness of our system was measured by conducting a comparison experiment with a previous system. Although the sample size was not sufficient, the experimental results suggest that learning with our system could contribute to improve learners' understanding of program and that our system would be more effective than the previous system.

This study portrays a learning support system that visually represents the structure of stepwise algorithm refinement, also known as the structure of program code abstraction, aligned with the teacher's instructional objectives. We focus on the varying needs of learners in programming education and consider the possibility that different levels of stepwise refinement may be required based on their knowledge and experience. Novice learners with limited programming experience may need program code abstractions in finer steps, rather than the abstraction of numerous statements simultaneously. For learners with a certain level of experience, abstraction with excessive steps may hinder their holistic understanding of the entire program from a higher perspective. In this study, we developed a program visualization system that empowers teachers to customize the visualizations of the structure of stepwise abstractions and the data structures utilized by the target program according to their instructional intentions. We introduced the proposed system into an actual class and evaluated its effectiveness by measuring the degree of improvement in learners' understanding based on tests.

Recently, big earthquakes happen worldwide, and UNDRR adopted the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. Learning about earthquakes is getting more important. When learning about disasters, it is important to treat them as it is their own problem. For this, Mitsuhara proposed the GLI (Global, Local, and Individual) model of disaster education. To make learners learn as it is their problem, we need to develop an environment that they can perform the local and individual disaster learning. It is also important to keep learning about disasters. For this, we prototyped evacuation learning game with VR, and the game reproduces the environment that is familiar to learners with VR to achieve local and individual level disaster learning. In this study, we reproduced building No.5 in our university where students mainly used every day because the target students of the game are our university students. We also conducted a preliminary experimental evaluation of the learning game. The results showed that (1) the reproduced environment can encourage learners to imagine a situation that an earthquake happens at the place that is familiar to them, (2) the game factors may motivate learners to learn about disasters.

In our previous research, we developed a learning support system for teaching a systematic debugging process. However, it was observed that all the subjects were unable to learn the entire process but some managed to learn it partially at experimental evaluation. We considered following two reasons: (1) the level of debugging skills we expected for subjects was higher than their actual level and (2) subjects were not offered lectures about the debugging process and required skills but were provided with only some exercises. For (1), we consider that they need to gain more basic debugging skills. For example, we decided to teach a skill to observe variables’ values. For (2), we designed a lecture that learners could attend to learn the process and debugging skills. The lecture has instruction and exercise parts. Next, we extended our learning support system to be adapted to the lecture and assist learners who face difficulties in the exercises. In this paper, we report a design of the learning support system and the lecture.