A Hybrid Model for Teaching Recursion

Novice programmers struggle to understand the concept of recursion, partly because of unfamiliarity with recursive activities, difficulty with visualizing program execution, and difficulty understanding its back flow of control. In this paper we discuss the conceptual and program visualization approaches to teaching recursion. We also introduce our approach to teaching recursion in the ChiQat-Tutor system that relies on ideas from both approaches. ChiQat-Tutor will help Computer Science students learn recursion, develop accurate mental models of recursion, and serve as an effective visualization tool with which hidden contexts of recursion can become evident.