The Effectiveness of Hedy and Python Tutor in Helping Students Learning Programming

Understanding programming syntax and program execution is sometimes challenging for novices. In this study, we combined Hedy and Python Tutor to support undergraduate students in their first year to learn programming. Hedy is a text-based programming language to introduce syntax rules gradually from human language to Python while Python Tutor is a popular program visualization tool to show how a program is executed step-by-step. We performed quasi-experiments measuring the impact of introducing both Hedy and Python Tutor over three batches of students (133). The result shows that students appreciate the use of Hedy but experience insignificant improvement in their performance. However, combined with program visualization, Hedy appears to improve student performance in a substantial manner for the exams.