A Web-Based Environment to Teach Introductory Programming based on a Bi-Directional Layered Notional Machine

We present a novel browser-based environment to teach introductory programming. This platform combines gamification with peer-to-peer interaction. Students write programs (bots) that play simple board games on their behalf, and can exercise these bots by playing against the bots developed by their peers. The tool is web-based in order to facilitate lowcost delivery and collaboration. The user interface provides unique tracing features based on a bi-directional layered notional machine. This creates some interesting technical challenges due to the limitations of traditional tracing technologies such as debugger interfaces and continuations. We discuss how we solved these problems, and present several experiments used to validate the scalability of our approach. The proof-of-concept implementation is based on the SoGaCo platform and the PrimeGame, using Java as the programming language.