Student Understanding of the C++ Notional Machine Through Traditional Teaching with Conceptual Contraposition and Program Memory Tracing
Jeisson Hidalgo-Céspedes$^{1}$, Gabriela Marín$^{1}$, Vladimir Lara$^{1}$
$^{1}$Universidad de Costa Rica. Costa Rica
email: jeisson.hidalgo@ucr.ac.cr, gabriela.marin@ucr.ac.cr, vladimir.lara@ecci.ucr.ac.cr

Schedule:Wed 21st@15:15, Room: C

In order to learn a programming language, a correct understanding of its notional machine is mandatory. Students acquire that comprehension mainly through visual and verbal explanations provided by professors, books, videos, and other instructional materials. This research applied the conceptual contraposition technique and program memory tracing technique to the prevalent teaching method in our country: the lecture. The understanding of the C++ notional machine was evaluated on students of a Programming II (CS2) course that implemented the mentioned methods. Results revealed that these techniques applied to the lecture are insufficient to help students develop satisfactory mental models of the C++ notional machine.

BibTex

@InProceedings{CLEI-2015:144118,
	author 		= {Jeisson Hidalgo-Céspedes and Gabriela Marín and Vladimir Lara},
	title 		= {Student Understanding of the C++ Notional Machine Through Traditional Teaching with Conceptual Contraposition and Program Memory Tracing},
	booktitle 	= {2015 XLI Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI)},
	pages 		= {850--857},
	year 		= {2015},
	editor 		= {Hector Cancela and Alex Cuadros-Vargas and Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas},
	address 	= {Arequipa-Peru},
	month 		= {October},
	organization 	= {CLEI},
	publisher 	= {CLEI},
	url 		= {http://clei.org/clei2015/144118},
	isbn 		= {978-1-4673-9143-6},
	}