Comparing the effectiveness of different educational uses of program animations.

ABSTRACTIn this paper we study two different approaches to using program animations with educational aims: their construction by students -a constructivist and active approach- and their vision -a less active approach. In addition, we compare both approaches to a traditional teaching methodology where animations are not used. We have conducted an experiment with functional program animations using an existing IDE with visualization features called WinHIPE. We have analyzed the results in terms of Bloom's Taxonomy and the complexity of the topics covered. We have detected learning improvements in high levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, namely analysis and synthesis. Moreover, our results show that program animations are unnecessary for simple topics, support the joint use of vision and construction tasks in medium-complexity topics, and recommend vision tasks together with the typical methodology but without the use of animations in the most complex topics.