Schedule VIScon 2023

It is difficult to relate programming code to the purpose of the application, especially for inexperienced programmers. The abstract nature of programming code can be a barrier to learning computer science in school.

We developed a web-based virtual reality application that uses an intuitive metaphor, a city, to represent the structure of software. We evaluated this approach in school computer science classes and will report on the results of these experiences.

Computational thinking and software engineering can be difficult to grasp. For example, the fact that software is made up of several interrelated modules is not visible from the outside when interacting with an application. This can discourage novices, such as pupils, from pursuing computer science.
We built a virtual reality tool that visualizes the components of software and their relationships using a familiar metaphor, a city. This replaces the inherent abstractness of programming with a known metaphor. Modules, for instance, are represented as neighborhoods of the city and classes are shown as houses. Despite the composition of the software from modules and classes, the tools also visualize properties of these modules. These are, for example, quality metrics or the size of the code base of each module. For example, classes with bad quality metrics can be displayed as houses with a damaged facade.
The frontend of the tool is built using the 3D framework Babylon.js. The tool has interchangeable language parsers to support different programming languages and code analysis techniques. The current implementation can pull code from GitHub repositories and uses quality metrics from SonarQube.
The talk will introduce the topic of software visualization and motivate the idea of the Software City. The architecture of the application will be presented in detail. The tool is being used and evaluated in primary and secondary school computer science classes. We expect to be able to present the results of evaluations of the tool programming classes.

Info

Day: 2023-10-21
Start time: 11:20
Duration: 00:25
Room: HG E 1.1

Links:

• iCalendar

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