isbn9789526046266

Chapter 18
We Explored What Happens During VPS
Sessions
This chapter reports empirical work conducted by the author of the thesis in collaboration with Lauri
Malmi. We explored the question:
What happens during visual program simulation sessions?
Like the phenomenographic study of the previous chapter, the work we present in this chapter is exploratory.
Visual program simulation is a new instructional approach about which not much is known. We sought a
rich, empirically founded description of what students do as they work on VPS exercises. Such a description
can give practitioners a better sense of what goes on and can inspire further research questions.
The above research question is broad. In this work, we focused on two subquestions, the second of
which is an open-ended one:
1. What informs students’ choices of simulation steps?
2. What other interesting episodes can we observe?
In Section 18.1 below we describe our research methods. Section 18.2 presents our main findings, which are
complemented by some quantitative results in Section 18.3. In Section 18.4, we consider the implications
of our findings for VPS system design and pedagogy.
18.1 We analyzed recordings of students
18.1.1 The data came from observations and interviews
We used data from both observations and interviews. We surmised that a blend of more ‘natural’ data
with interviews, which allow probing questions from the researcher, would give us a rich idea of what
happens during VPS session.
Observations
We collected videos of 41 pairs of students working on two VPS exercises in UUhistle. The students had
been asked to discuss what they did as they solved the exercises.
The students were volunteers who had been solicited with an announcement on the course web site.
They were roughly seven weeks into the spring 2010 offering of CS1–Imp–Pyth (see Section 16.4). All
of the 41 student pairs featured at least one student who had used UUhistle in previous assignments; in
most pairs, both had. The students received a small number of assignment points for taking part.
This observation data was collected as a part of a broader research setup, which we describe in the
next chapter. (The pairs formed the VPS group in the controlled experiment reported in that chapter.)
In short: the pairs were given one program animation and two VPS assignments, and their task was to
301