Development and Testing of a Graphical FORTRAN Learning Tool for Novice Programmers

To address the difficulties associated with computer programming, this article first looks at some reasons why students, especially engineering students, find programming such a daunting prospect, and it proposes a programming learning tool managed by a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA). The DFA machine used a graphical environment provided by Simulink to teach the FORmula TRANslator (FORTRAN) programming language to science students.The proposed programming learning tool and the traditional method of teaching were compared and evaluated. The results of evaluation indicated that there was an improvement in learning effectiveness of the proposed learning tool.