Visualization of Execution of Programming Statements

Programming plays an important role in both academic and career development among engineers and computer scientists, however, acquiring and developing knowledge of programming is a complex process. Understanding program behavior is one of the most important factors in learning programming and in maintenance of existing programs. Here, the need exists to develop tools to facilitate understanding and to serve more than documentation and initial planning needs of a program (i.e., pseudo codes and flowcharts). In order to understand a program's behavior, a programmer needs a computer model that will execute it. Visualization has proven effective as a strategy for providing programmers and students with clearer meaning of their codes, developing and maintaining programs, and learning programming. This paper proposes a new diagrammatic methodology that produces a conceptual representation of program instructions. It can provide a foundation for understanding the behavior of running programs. The paper also reports on applying the new method to teaching an introductory university course, the results demonstrate that it improves understanding of programming and its underlying computer operations.