FlowARP - Using Augmented Reality for Visualizing Control Flows in Programs.

There is a rise in the use of visual cues such as augmented reality and virtual reality to teach programming concepts and algorithms to novice programmers. These visualizations increase motivation among novice programmers, and also contribute to better conceptual understanding. For effective implementation of an algorithm or program, it is important to understand its flow of execution. The flow of an algorithm is commonly represented pictorially as a control flow graph (CFG) or as an abstract syntax tree (AST). However, existing representations are static in nature. Adding a dynamic aspect to the CFG to represent the flow of a program or an algorithm might ease the conceptual understanding. Integrating this dynamic CFG with augmented reality might also increase motivation among students in viewing and understanding various algorithms and programs. Hence, we present FlowARP, an augmented reality based visualization tool, to demonstrate the flow of programs. As a first step, we have designed FlowARP to support C/C++ programs and evaluated the usefulness of FlowARP through a user study with 44 undergraduate students, based on an amalgamated approach that assess usefulness and user perception. The results indicated that users were able to solve code-snippet based questions in lesser time, using FlowARP. However, we also observed that users take some amount of time to get accustomed to FlowARP.