Visualizing programs with Jeliot 3

Abstract

We present a program visualization tool called Jeliot 3 that is designed to aid novice students to learn procedural and object oriented programming. The key feature of Jeliot is the fully or semi-automatic visualization of the data and control flows. The development process of Jeliot has been research-oriented, meaning that all the different versions have had their own research agenda rising from the design of the previous version and their empirical evaluations. In this process, the user interface and visualization has evolved to better suit the targeted audience, which in the case of Jeliot 3, is novice programmers. In this paper we explain the model for the system and introduce the features of the user interface and visualization engine. Moreover, we have developed an intermediate language that is used to decouple the interpretation of the program from its visualization. This has led to a modular design that permits both internal and external extensibility.