engleski

An educational tool for visualising actor programs

Object-oriented programming (OOP) is probably the most popular programming paradigm today. Because of this, it is often taught at faculties associated with computer science. The general idea of OOP is to break a complex problem into abstractions called objects which interact with each other via method invocation. On the other hand, the actor model provides a computation model based on agents that are called actors. Actors in the actor model are similar to objects in OOP, but unlike objects are concurrent and communicate by message passing. At our faculty, a game- based approach is used to teach students about OOP. The actors in a game can be taught as agents that interact with an environment. Furthermore, students program agent behaviour in our artificial intelligence course. Therefore, students have experience with both objects and agents. However, students still find it difficult to understand the actor model and build applications with it. In order to help students, we have developed a visualisation system for actor-based applications. We collected responses on the system after presenting it to students that were taught the model. In this paper, we i) present the developed visualisations system and ii) report the results on the responses collected.

actor model ; message-passing ; notional machine ; object-oriented programming ; program visualisation

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