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Experiences in Usability Evaluation of Educational Programming Tools

This chapter advocates for an approach to constructing educational tools that consists in designing small systems aimed at achieving clear educational goals and evaluating them in actual teaching situations. The authors addressed this approach with a number of small systems. In this chapter, they describe their experience in the development, use, and evaluation of two educational systems: SRec and GreedEx. The former is a highly interactive program animation system of recursion, and the latter is an interactive assistant aimed at learning the role of selection functions in greedy algorithms by means of experimentation. The evaluations allowed the authors to identify faults and weaknesses of the systems, and these results were used to enhance the systems. Moreover, their approach has yielded very high values with respect to effectiveness and student satisfaction.