The goal of this project was to improve the user interface and workflows of Jeliot 3, an Open Source Java Program Visualization application that helps Java beginners to understand coding concepts.

Along with mentors Roman Bednarik, Andres Moreno and Niko Myller, Sharad Baliyan identified possible pitfalls when newbies of programming make use of Jeliot, and created paper prototypes to overcome those issues.

Read on for Sharad’s project report:

Project background

Jeliot is a pedagogical tool that helps people new to programming concepts to develop mental models of how programs/algorithms are executed, and how basic programming constructs operate. Jeliot does this through an animated visualization of program/algorithm execution. It shows how variables, data, data structures, control structures etc function in an interesting animated theatrical show.

Process

As a primer to the whole project I set about educating myself on the theories of learning and their application to digital products and the ones that Jeliot is ideologically based on. With help from Roman this let me understand whether the Architecture (interaction and interface) supported the goals, and if I could contribute to further them.

So the first step was to go through a cognitive walkthrough of Jeliot, identifying issues and concerns that a newbie to programming would encounter. Later on I had the opportunity to travel to a engineering college. This allowed for some good user testing on both Novice users (students) and lecturers (who might use Jeliot as a teaching aid). The testing served as an evaluation of the results of the cognitive walkthrough, and also to identify broader concerns that needed to be addressed.

At this point I decided that other than some interaction flow issues and interface issues, a graded introduction to Jeliot and its goals could help get people new to Jeliot (and importantly programming) quickly on their way to learning.

To resolve issues identified, I continued with some design solutions for the interaction architecture. These designs were turned into Paper prototypes and user tested. Quick design iterations happened and have lead to some concretization of design directions. Right now discussions on implementation and how that will affect design are going on with Roman and Niko to decide the way forward from here.

Also a wizard has been developed for novice users (of both Jeliot and programming) which is right now under user testing. This part of the project is also in the same implementation discussion.

Featured Screenshots

Future

The Jeliot project is still ongoing, now fine tuning of design implementation into code and its evaluation is still underway.

This project was mentored by:
United Users, Finland