In this paper, we describe our experiences using dynamic program visualizations in our Java-based CS1 and CS2 courses during the spring semester 2013. The visualizations were constructed by both faculty and students using the new viewer canvas in jGRASP. A public beta version was downloaded and installed in our computer labs and on student and faculty machines. Program visualizations were used in the classroom as well as in lab activities and programming projects. Since the viewers had already been evaluated in controlled experiments, our focus was on ease of use of the viewer canvas by the students and the utility of the program visualizations in helping students understand their programs. Direct observations in the lab and individual meetings with students to discuss their work indicated that students could indeed build dynamic visualizations that, in conjunction with the debugger, helped them understand and correct bugs in their programs much more effectively than using the debugger alone.

This workshop will focus on using the new jGRASP viewer canvas which provides an exciting new dimension to dynamic program visualization. The canvas allows students and instructors to organize dynamic viewers of multiple objects and primitives to quickly form coherent program visualizations. Students can quickly build and save visualizations of their own programs, and faculty can create visualizations and provide them to students with example programs. "Playing" a program in canvas mode brings the visualization to life as objects come into scope and the canvas is updated automatically. All educators who teach Java will benefit from this workshop. It will be especially suitable for instructors who teach CS1 (introduction to programming), CS2 (introduction to data structures), and CS3 (introduction to algorithms), as well as for instructors of AP courses in high schools. jGRASP is a freely available educational IDE (http://www.jgrasp.org/); no prior experience with jGRASP is expected. Laptop required.

Dynamic program viewing is a form of visual verification in which a student executes one or more statements in a program and interactively observes the behavior in basic viewers (e.g., an object with its fields) and/or conceptual viewers (e.g., the structural display of binary search tree). This activity can be extremely useful from a program understanding perspective as well as a debugging perspective. In contrast, testing (e.g., with JUnit) provides a way to create persistent test cases and then run and re-run them in an efficient way. We have observed that dynamic program viewing and testing are quite complementary. When test cases are written and executed, dynamic program viewing becomes a valuable aid in traditional debugging as well. Since most test cases are written at the functional level (e.g., did a method return the expected value?), dynamically viewing test methods as they execute can provide students with a deeper level of understanding. The jGRASP IDE has been extended to allow students to combine dynamic program viewing with JUnit testing. In this paper, we discuss both the technical success of this effort and several examples that demonstrate the potential for student use in early computing courses.

jGRASP has three integrated approaches for interacting with its dynamic viewers for data structures: debugger, workbench, and text-based interactions that allow individual Java statements and expressions to be executed/evaluated. These approaches can be used together to provide a complementary set of interactions with the dynamic viewers. Data structure identification and rendering were tested by examining examples from 20 data structure textbooks. Controlled experiments with CS2 students indicate that the viewers can have a significant positive impact on student performance. The overall result is a flexible environment for interacting with effective dynamic data structure visualizations generated by a robust structure identifier.

Inheritance and polymorphism are important OOP topics in CS1 and CS2. While these concepts are generally straightforward, there are subtleties that may leave students confused. For example, accessibility of a field in an object is generally determined by the declaring type and access modifiers of the field, and the context in the executing program from which the field is referenced. The dynamic object viewers in jGRASP have been expanded to allow the user to: (1) change the declared type of the object reference to any compatible type and (2) change the accessibility context of the object reference. These options enable the user to explore accessibility and visibility relationships by experimenting with any object on the workbench or in the debugger. Symbols, color, and text are used in the viewer to indicate inheritance relationships, accessibility, and visibility of fields and methods. Initial classroom use has demonstrated the potential for these new viewer features as an aid to students who are learning about inheritance and polymorphism.

The jGRASP lightweight IDE has been extended to provide object viewers that automatically generate dynamic, state-based visualizations of data structures in Java. These viewers provide multiple synchronized visualizations of data structures as the user steps through the source code in either debug or workbench mode. This tight integration in a lightweight IDE provides a unique and promising environment for learning data structures. Initial classroom use has demonstrated the object viewers' potential as an aid to students who are learning to write and modify classes representing data structures. Recently completed controlled experiments with CS2 students indicate that these viewers can have a significant positive impact on student performance.

The jGRASP lightweight IDE provides object viewers that automatically generate dynamic, state-based visualizations of objects and primitive variables in Java. Multiple synchronized visualizations of an object, including complex data structures, are immediately available to users from the jGRASP debugger window or object workbench. Initial use has demonstrated the object viewers' potential as an aid to understanding and debugging

This paper describes a software engineering project course for freshman. The course has been designed to engage and motivate software engineering students at the beginning of their matriculation, while at the same time providing solid software engineering content. Student teams use a simple software process based on extreme programming to complete a semester-long project in computer animation. Course motivation, structure, and implementation are described

The jGRASP IDE provides new object viewers that automatically generate dynamic, state-based visualizations of objects and primitive variables in Java. Multiple synchronized visualizations of an object, including complex data structures, are immediately available to users from the jGRASP debugger window or object workbench. Initial classroom use has demonstrated the object viewers' potential as an aid to student learning, while future research will explore their utility through controlled experiments.

In 2001, the ACM and the IEEE-CS published Computing Curricula 2001 which contains curriculum recommendations for undergraduate programs in computer science. That report also called for additional discipline-specific volumes for each of computer engineering, information systems, and software engineering. In addition, it called for an Overview Volume to provide a synthesis of the various volumes. The Computing Curricula 2004 Task Force undertook the job of fulfilling the latter charge. The purpose of this session is to present the recently completed work of that Task Force, now known as Computing Curricula 2005 (CC2005), and to generate discussion among, and feedback from SIGCSE members about ongoing and future work.

This position statement outlines methods by which universities can determine industry needs and provides recommendations to reverse declining enrollments trends. Suggestions are offered for curricular topics important to software development in the future as well for software tools that will be necessary to make these topics less formidable for undergraduates.

SIGCSE 2004 marked the official announcement of the ACM Java Task Force, which is working to develop a stable collection of pedagogical resources that will make it easier to teach Java to first-year computing students. The Java Task Force has received funding from the ACM Education Board, the SIGCSE Special Projects Fund, and the National Science Foundation (NSF Award DUE-0411905). This session offers an update on the work of the Java Task Force over the past year and provides an opportunity for community feedback prior to the publication of the final report in June 2005.

A framework for producing dynamic data structure visualizations within the context of a lightweight IDE is described. Multiple synchronized visualizations of a data structure can be created with minimal coding through the use of an external viewer model. The framework supplies a customizable viewer template as well as high-level APIs to a graph drawing library and the Java Debugger Interface. Initial classroom use has demonstrated the framework's ease of use as well as its potential to as an aid to student learning.

This paper describes efforts to use industry wireless software development practices in the classroom. Nokia's OK Java 2 Platform Micro Edition (J2ME) application certification program was chosen for use in a core set of wireless software engineering courses. The adaptation process included 1) modifying Nokia OK application standards for classroom use as examples of what is expected of industry-quality software; 2) incorporating Nokia OK software development tools into a student-friendly software development environment; and 3) implementing in-house Nokia OK certification procedures as a basis for assessing student projects and providing feedback.

Recently, the first two in a series of planned comprehension experiments were performed to measure the effect of the control structure diagram (CSD) on program comprehensibility. Upper- and lower-division computer science and software engineering students were asked to respond to questions regarding the structure and execution of one source code module of a public domain graphics library. The time taken for each response and the correctness of each response was recorded. Statistical analysis of the data collected from these two experiments revealed that the CSD was highly significant in enhancing the subjects' performance in this program comprehension task. The results of these initial experiments promise to shed light on fundamental questions regarding the effect of software visualizations on program comprehensibility.

Recently, the first in a series of planned comprehension experiments was performed to measure the effect of the control structure diagram (CSD) on program comprehensibility. Upper-division computer science students were asked to respond to questions regarding the structure and execution of a source code module written in Java. Statistical analysis of the data collected from this experiment revealed that the CSD was highly significant in enhancing the subjects' performance in this program comprehension task. The results of this initial experiment along with the planned follow-on experiments promise to shed light on fundamental questions regarding the effect of software visualizations on program comprehensibility.

In the fall of 1998, the ACM Education Board and the Educational Activities Board of the IEEE Computer Society appointed representatives to a joint task force to prepare Curriculum 2001, the next installment in a series of reports on the undergraduate computer science curriculum that began in 1968 and was then updated in 1978 and 1991. Interim reports on the initial planning of the curriculum were presented at the SIGCSE symposium in March 1999 and at the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference in November 1999. In February 2000, the Curriculum 2001 Task Force will release a preliminary version of its report, in the hope of gaining feedback from a wider audience. The purpose of this panel is to give attenders at the SIGCSE conference to review the current state of the preliminary draft and offer their comments to the members of the Curriculum 2001 steering committee on the panel.

Although a computer science curriculum may use a single language as its "core" language, many curricula require students to learn and use multiple languages for course or practicum work. Students benefit from the exposure to other languages and other language models. However, a problem arising from the multi-lingual nature of a curriculum is the necessity to learn and use different development environments and language front-ends. GRASP (Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures, and Processes) is a software engineering tool currently being successfully utilized as a common development environment for the multi-lingual computer science curriculum at Auburn University. Besides providing a common front-end for different languages, GRASP also provides automated visualization of source code in the form of the control structure diagram and the complexity profile graph. This paper describes GRASP and its current use in the computer science curriculum. GRASP is freely available via the Internet at the following URL: http://www.eng.auburn.edu/grasp

Software testing is an important step in the development of complex systems. The construction of test cases using traditional methods usually requires considerable manual effort. QUEST/Ada—Query Utility Environment for Software Testing of Ada, is a prototype test case generation system that uses various heuristics-based approaches to generate test cases. The system, which is designed for unit testing, generates test cases by monitoring the branch coverage progress and intelligently modifying existing test cases to achieve additional coverage. Three heuristics-based approaches along with a random test case generation method were studied to compare their branch coverage performance. Although some constraints are imposed by the prototype, the framework provides a useful foundation for further heuristics-based test case generation research. The design of the system, the heuristic rules used in the system, and an evaluation of each rule’s performance are presented.

A technique for reverse engineering graphical user interfaces (GUIs) produced with Xtoolkit source code is presented. Two independent graphical representations are automatically generated to assist GUI programmers in the development, testing, maintenance, and reengineering of X-based GUI source code. This capability to generate both structural and behavioral views has the potential to provide major improvements in the comprehensibility of X source code. Whereas generating widget instance trees to describe the structure of an X interface is common, the automatic generation of dialogue state diagrams to describe the behavior of an X interface is unique to our technique. The intent of this paper is to provide insight into the functional details of our automated reverse engineering process for the benefit of other reverse engineering researchers and programming tool developers.

No abstract available.

This paper focuses on the interpersonal issues, often referred to as “team dynamics,” that can become quite important as students construct a large-scale programming project. Differing methods in which teams can develop phases of such projects are presented with advantages and disadvantages for each topic discussed. Various methods of student team selection and team communication techniques are first considered. Then various methods that can be used to define large-scale student team projects are discussed. The effect of team dynamics on the classic software engineering phases of specification, implementation, testing, and evaluation phases of student projects is discussed. Four project scenarios that have been used in the authors' classes, as well as rationales for these project designs are discussed. The paper concludes with results derived from using these scenarios in the classroom.

Rule-based software test data generation is proposed as an alternative to either path/predicate analysis or random data generation. A prototype rule-based test data generator for Ada programs is constructed and compared to a random test data generator. Four Ada procedures are used in the comparison. Approximately 2000 rule-based test cases and 100000 randomly generated test cases are automatically generated and executed. The success of the two methods is compared using standard coverage metrics. Simple statistical tests showing that even the primitive rule-based test data generation prototype is significantly better than random data generation are performed. This result demonstrates that rule-based test data generation is feasible and shows great promise in assisting test engineers, especially when the rule base is developed further.>