OMNotebook – Interactive WYSIWYG Book Software for Teaching Programming,

OMNotebook is one of the first open source software systems that makes is possible to create interactive WYSIWYG books for teaching and learning programming. It has currently been used for course material (DrModelica) in teaching the Modelica language, but can easily be adapted to electronic books on teaching other programming languages, or even other subjects such as physics, chemistry, etc., where phenomena can be illustrated by dynamic simulations within the book. This could substantially improve teaching in a number of areas, including programming. 1 Need for more Interactive Learning Traditional teaching methods are often too passive and do engage the student. A typical example is traditional lecturing. Another typical learning method is reading a textbook on a subject matter. This is a good method, but sometimes requires a lot from the student. Also, learning programming needs interaction and programming exercises in order to grasp the concept. A third way, would be to make the book active – be able to run programs and exercises within the book, and mix lecturing with doing exercises and reading in the interactive book. 2 Interactive Notebooks with Literate Programming Interactive Electronic Notebooks are active documents that may contain technical computations and text, as well as graphics. Hence, these documents are suitable to be used for teaching and experimentation, simulation scripting, model documentation and storage, etc. 2.1 Mathematica Notebooks Literate Programming (Knuth 1984) is a form of programming where programs are integrated with documentation in the same document. Mathematica notebooks (Wolfram 1997) is one of the first WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-WhatYou-Get) systems that support Literate Programming. Such notebooks are used, e.g., in the MathModelica modeling and simulation environment, e.g. see Figure 1 below and Chapter 19 in (Fritzson 2004)