On the design and development of UML-based visual environment for novice programmers

Few beginners find learning to program easy. There are many factors at work in this phenomenon with some being simply inherent in the subject itself, while others have more to do with deficiencies in learning methods and resources. As a result, many programming environments, software applications, and learning tools have been developed to address the difficulties faced by novice programmers. Of these tools, visual-based tools and the use of visualization have proven to be very effective in helping novices overcome several of these traditional difficulties. In this paper, we first examine the traditional difficulties that novice programmers encounter when take an introductory-level programming course are examined. It is important to gain an understanding of the scope of these difficulties first, as the rest of this paper considers how visual tools, visualization, and UML can be utilized to aid novice developers in these areas of difficulties. Next, we provide an analysis of several modern visual learning tools, including EROSI, AnimPascal, BlueJ, FLINT, BOOST, and SOLVEIT. In particular, we look at how these tools use visualization to help mitigate the difficulties novice programmers face. Each tool is also assessed based on its overall effectiveness of using visual aids and visualization to help the beginning programmer. We then turn our attention to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and how it can be utilized t