During this time we have met many hardworking students constantly struggling with programming exercises or even failing the course. BACKGROUND For last 6 years we have been teaching Python based first programming course (CS1) in our university. It is free to use, open source, and developed with the goal of supporting extensions written by third parties. Thonny has been successfully tested for one semester in the context of a CS1 course at our university. According to the engagement level taxonomy developed in, Thonny supports controlled viewing of students own content, because users can choose the granularity of each step during the program animation and they can animate any Python 3 program.
$15.00 DOI: user actions in detail sufficient for replaying the programming process. Request permissions from Koli Calling 2015, November 19-22, 2015, Koli, Finland c 2015 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee.
Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. It can log Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. It has features to illustrate the concepts of variables, control flow, expression evaluation, function calls, recursion, references and heap, objects (including classes and functions as values), composite data (lists, dictionaries and sets) and file IO. Besides standard program construction and execution capabilities, it has comprehensive support for program animation. Thonny is a new beginner-friendly Python IDE we developed in University of Tartu. According to the terminology given in, we call these program animation systems. Although these rules can be described verbally, for many students this is not sufficient, so different tools have been developed for visualizing program behavior at runtime. INTRODUCTION In order to successfully learn imperative programming, students must learn to regard the program interpreter as a machine and relate language constructs with the corresponding rules of this machine. CCS Concepts Social and professional topics CS1 Software and its engineering Integrated and visual development environments Keywords Computing education, Programming, IDE, Python, Program animation, Program visualization 1. It is free to use and open for extension. It supports educational research by logging user actions for replaying or analyzing the programming process. Among its prominent features are different ways of stepping through the code, stepby-step expression evaluation, intuitive visualization of the call stack and mode for explaining the concepts of references and heap. 1 Introducing Thonny, a Python IDE for Learning Programming Aivar Annamaa Institute of Computer Science University of Tartu ABSTRACT Thonny is a new Python IDE for learning and teaching programming that can make program visualization a natural part of the beginners workflow.