Roles of Variables and Learning to Program

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and new methods and techniques to help novices to learn programming are needed. Roles of variables is a recently introduced concept that captures expert programmers’ tacit knowledge in a way that can be explicitly taught to students. The use of roles and role-based program animation in teaching has been found to facilitate learning programming skills. During this talk I will introduce the role concept and the individual roles, describe how roles can be introduced to students, and review empirical results obtained by our research group while investigating the applicability and effectiveness of roles.