A Practical Study Of Program Visualization Supporting High School Students’ Understanding Of Computing Concepts

With the rapid development of the information age,computer programming can help people to process data quickly and efficiently.In the teaching of programming,the teaching of computing concepts is in the core position,and has been widely valued by teachers and researchers at home and abroad.In order to promote students’ understanding of computing concepts,many researchers consider using visualization tools to support students’ programming learning.In high school,Python,as the main content of programming teaching,provides a good learning environment for high school students to learn computing concepts.However,computing concepts are very abstract,which leads to many cognitive difficulties in the process of understanding computing concepts.Program visualization tools provide support for students to understand the connotation of computing concepts by displaying the running process of programs,and have received extensive attention from researchers.This study aims to integrate program visualization with the teaching of computing concepts in programming.Under the guidance of related learning theories,a teaching model of computing concepts based on program visualization is constructed,which includes three parts: concept presentation,concept construction and concept application.According to the teaching mode of computing concept based on program visualization,the teaching design is carried out to promote students ’understanding of computing concepts.In the following,the main work and achievements of this study are discussed from three aspects.(1)Basic theoretical research.This study combs the relevant literature at home and abroad on the teaching application of "program visualization" and promoting the understanding of "computing concept",deeply analyzes the current research status of the two,and defines the concepts of computing concept and program visualization within the scope of this study.The related theories are sorted out,and the dual coding theory and constructivism learning theory are expounded and summarized.(2)Construction of Computing Concept Teaching Mode Based on Program Visualization.By consulting relevant literature,the significance of computing concepts for programming teaching and the framework of computing concepts in Python are analyzed.This thesis summarizes the cognitive difficulties of students for the understanding of computing concepts,and the advantages and mechanisms of program visualization for promoting the understanding of computing concepts.At the same time,the classical teaching models of computing concepts and their typical characteristics were sorted out,and on this basis,the teaching model of computing concepts based on program visualization was constructed.According to the constructed teaching mode,the teaching design of structural computing concepts is carried out,including the teaching design of branch concepts,counting loops and conditional loops.According to the needs of the teaching experiment,the measurement tool of this study was determined.(3)Practical Research of Computing Concept Teaching Mode Based on Program Visualization.In this study,two parallel classes in the first grade of a high school in Zibo City,Shandong Province were selected as experimental class and control class to carry out teaching experiments in the information technology discipline.The students’ computing concept understanding test and student satisfaction survey were carried out,and some students were selected for interview,in order to understand the students’ computing concept understanding and students’ attitudes towards the teaching process and results of computing concept understanding.The results show that compared with the traditional teaching mode,the teaching mode of computing concepts based on program visualization can better promote students ’understanding of computing concepts,and the promotion effect is more obvious in each standard to measure the understanding of computing concepts.Students were more satisfied with both the teaching process and the learning results of using the program visualization tool for computational concepts.This study proves that the teaching mode of computing concepts based on program visualization can effectively promote students ’understanding of computing concepts and improve the quality of programming teaching,which provides a reference for future programming teaching.