Using Motion Infographics to Teach Computer Programming Concepts

Abstract

Although programming languages are expressive tools, their expressive power is quite limited. A direct consequence of this is that novice users have difficulty grasping the basic programming constructs mainly because there is a discrepancy between natural languages and programming languages (e.g., How do we express common human tasks in Python?). A relatively easy way to tackle this discrepancy is to use motion infographics. However, when pupils and students are familiar with abstraction, a basic idea of computational thinking, then one can use motion infographics that show familiar objects and/or ideas that should be used to teach the corresponding programming constructs. The author has used this approach to create motion infographics that explain conditional and repetitive constructs. However, this does not really work with recursion as one has to resort to the use of trees to explain this programming concept. All the motion infographics presented here have been produced with XeLaTeX, an open source tool that can be used to produce excellent printed/electronic documents.