Intuitive Source Code Visualization Tools for Improving Student Comprehension: BRICS

Abstract: Even relatively simple code analysis can be a daunting task for many first year students. Perceived complexity, coupled with foreign and harsh syntax, often outstrips the ability for students to take in what they are seeing in terms of their verbal memory. That is, first year students often lack the experience to encode critical building blocks in source code, and their interrelationships, into their own words. We believe this argues for the need for IDEs to provide additional support for representations that would appeal directly to visual memory. In this paper, we examine this need for intuitive source code visualization tools that are easily accessible to novice programmers, discuss the requirements for such a tool, and suggest a novel idea that takes advantage of human peripheral vision to achieve stronger overall code structure awareness.