Novis: A Notional Machine Implementation for Teaching Introductory Programming

Comprehension of programming and programs is known to be a difficult task for many beginning students, with many computing courses showing significant drop out and failure rates. In this paper, we present a notional machine implementation, Novis, to help with understanding of programming and its dynamics for beginning learners. The notional machine offers an abstraction of the physical machine designed for comprehension and learning purposes. Novis provides a real-time visualisation of this notional machine, and is integrated into BlueJ.