Implementation and Evaluation of an Automatic Visualization Tool "PGT" for Programming Education

As the demand for software is increasing more rapidly than ever, demand for programmers is increasing. It is important to educate novice programmers in order to increase the population of programmers. They have to read source codes of various programs, when they learn programming. But, it is not easy task for them to understand the behavior of a program only by reading the source code. This paper describes implementation and evaluation of an automatic visualization tool "PGT(Path Generation Tool)" for aiding programs in reading the source code of a Java program. PGT generates paths from a source code by visualizing the paths corresponded to the statements of the source code so that understand the meaningof the program easily.