Teaching roles of variables in elementary programming courses

Computer programming is a difficult skill for many students and new methods and techniques to help novices to learn programming are needed. This paper presents roles of variables as a new concept that can be used to assist in learning and gives detailed instructions on techniques to present roles to novices. These techniques are based on current learning theories and they have been used in a classroom experiment comparing traditional teaching with role-based teaching. The results suggest that the introduction of roles provides students a new conceptual framework that enables them to mentally process programs in a way similar to that of good code comprehenders; the use of role-based animation seems to assist in the adoption of role knowledge and expert-like programming skill.