Learn programming by visualizing code execution
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 20th Sep 2012 20:27 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
General Development "Online Python Tutor is a free educational tool that helps students overcome a fundamental barrier to learning programming: understanding what happens as the computer executes each line of a program's source code. Using this tool, a teacher or student can write a Python program directly in the web browser and visualize what the computer is doing step-by-step as it executes the program."
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RE[6]: barrier...learning
by renox on Sun 23rd Sep 2012 13:05 UTC in reply to "RE[5]: barrier...learning"
renox
Member since:
2005-07-06

I find that a low-level description is actively harmful for most new students. It's simply too irrelevant for their attempts at learning the language at hand and only adds to the information they have to memorize. Of course, I may be misunderstanding what you mean by low-level. I take it to mean explicitly detailing what op codes/assembly instructions and registries are/do.


Not *that* detailled, but for example learning how virtual functions work by looking at vtables and the pointer.


Typically, I find that functional languages are easier to teach because everyone has some experience with math and can do basic substitution (even if that's not how things are actually evaluated, substitution is a good enough model to start with.)


Provided you don't want to teach about performance..
Otherwise at some point you have to look at the binary generated, which is not too bad with C/C++ but with Haskell..

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