Incorporating Software Visualization into Prolog teaching: a challenge, a restriction, and an opportunity

: The difficulties students have in learning and using Prolog are well documented (e.g. Taylor, 1988). Many of these difficulties are due to the complexity of the execution model (Fung et al, 1990). Ever since the Byrd Box model (Byrd, 1980), the challenge has been to present the execution model in the most effective way. The term Software Visualization has been coined to describe the process of using textual and/or graphical formalisms to describe the execution of computer programs. Software Visualizations for Prolog have been numerous, though empirical evaluation has been sparse. Recent empirical work using a new empirical framework (Mulholland, 1995) has found that Prolog Software Visualizations differ markedly in how students can use them, and that even minor changes to the way the execution is presented can have dramatic effects on how well it is understood by students. Despite the large amount of systems that have been developed to clearly visualize the execution model, their edu..