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Chapter 22
What is Next for Visual Program
Simulation?
In this chapter, I briefly sketch out some possible futures for visual program simulation. I list some ideas
on future research on the current incarnation of VPS (Section 22.1), on tool development (Section 22.2),
and on how VPS could be used in different ways and in different contexts (Section 22.3).
22.1 There is plenty to research in VPS as presented
The most obvious follow-up to the present work is ‘more of the same’. The effects of VPS on learning
programming could be qualitatively and quantitatively investigated in more course offerings and by other
researchers. Future work may critique and perhaps improve the warrants for our claims about VPS, and
expand on those claims. Long-term studies would be especially useful for evaluating the overall impact
of VPS on learning programming. The aspects of VPS that we have explored qualitatively could be
investigated quantitatively; follow-up studies could determine the frequencies of students’ approaches to
and notions of VPS, for instance.
A potentially very fruitful source of data is the mistakes students make during VPS. Students’ mistakes
could be categorized from automatically generated session logs and analyzed both qualitatively and
quantitatively to discover what kinds of mistakes are common and to explore the causes behind them.
The work we have initiated in mapping students mistakes to misconceptions (in Chapter 18) could be
extended. Such work could have implications not only for the use of VPS but for introductory programming
education more generally. We already have a sizable database of students’ VPS logs; a master’s thesis
that investigates this data is being written.
A future study could compare the impact of VPS to another form of visualization use such as controlled
viewing. Such studies could be structured in terms of the 2DET taxonomy, a side product of this thesis
from Section 11.2.3, and might contribute towards establishing a more generic framework of learner
engagement in software visualization.
In the course offerings we have investigated, all students were given the same VPS assignments to do,
irrespective of prior knowledge or other factors. Documented phenomena such as the expertise reversal
effect (Section 4.5) suggest that prior knowledge has a dramatic impact on the effectiveness of learning
activities. Further research is needed on the interactions between VPS, learners’ programming expertise,
and learning outcomes. This line of research is important in order to understand how to use VPS in
classes in which students’ prior knowledge is highly variable, and also in order to attend, in instructional
design, to the growth of expertise during learning.
Cognitive load theory (Section 4.5) suggests still more avenues for future research. Cognitive load
measurement is a very demanding but potentially very worthwhile endeavor (Paas et al., 2003; Plass et al.,
2010). The effects of VPS on different types of cognitive load are presently unknown. Knowing more
about them would further our understanding of the impact of VPS on learning, aid tool development,
and allow us to position VPS exercises more accurately in relation to more familiar types of learning tasks
such as worked-out examples and problem-solving assignments (cf. Section 14.2).
This thesis has grounded VPS in a number of relevant theories from different research traditions, but
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