Visualizable Pseudo Programming Language

Selecting a right programming language for introductory CS courses is not an easy task. The pressure to use a commercially successful language can easily be the most significant factor in choosing the language. However, several studies suggest that it is preferable to use language especially designed for teaching. These languages are usually some kind of pseudo languages, defined by the programming educators. The idea of using pseudo language is to keep the syntax of the code as simple as possible so the students can focus on learning the programming concepts, instead of some irrelevant syntactical features. Pseudo languages are usually subsets of existing programming languages, and thus can be used to teach all the basic programming concepts. This however leads to a fact that programs written in pseudo code are usually not executable as-is, which is one of its main problems. With this in mind we have developed a program visualization tool called VILLE in university of Turku. The tool has a built-in pseudo language that is a subset of Python. Users can add programming examples written in Java and translate them to pseudo language. The programs in pseudo code can also be translated to a runnable Python code. Additionally, users can define their own pseudo language and modify the existing syntaxes.