Using software visualization to support the teaching of distributed programming

In this paper, we introduce MARVEL, a system designed to simplify the teaching of MapReduce, a popular distributed programming paradigm, through software visualization. At its core, it allows a teacher to describe and recreate a MapReduce application by interactively requesting, through a graphical...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of supercomputing Vol. 79; no. 4; pp. 3974 - 3998
Main Authors: Di Rocco, Lorenzo, Ferraro Petrillo, Umberto, Palini, Francesco
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Springer US 01.03.2023
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects:
Algorithms
Big Data
Compilers
Computer animation
Computer Science
Datasets
Distributed processing
Interpreters
Processor Architectures
Programming Languages
Software
Students
Teachers
Visualization
Spark
Software visualization
Distributed computing
CS teaching
MapReduce
ISSN:0920-8542, 1573-0484
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In this paper, we introduce MARVEL, a system designed to simplify the teaching of MapReduce, a popular distributed programming paradigm, through software visualization. At its core, it allows a teacher to describe and recreate a MapReduce application by interactively requesting, through a graphical interface, the execution of a sequence of MapReduce transformations that target an input dataset. Then, the execution of each operation is illustrated on the screen by playing an appropriate graphical animation stage, highlighting aspects related to its distributed nature. The sequence of all animation stages, played back one after the other in a sequential order, results in a visualization of the whole algorithm. The content of the resulting visualization is not simulated or fictitious, but reflects the real behavior of the requested operations, thanks to the adoption of an architecture based on a real instance of a distributed system running on Apache Spark. On the teacher’s side, it is expected that by using MARVEL he/she will spend less time preparing materials and will be able to design a more interactive lesson than with electronic slides or a whiteboard. To test the effectiveness of the proposed approach on the learner side, we also conducted a small scientific experiment with a class of volunteer students who formed a control group. The results are encouraging, showing that the use of software visualization guarantees students a learning experience at least equivalent to that of conventional approaches.
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ISSN:0920-8542
1573-0484
DOI:10.1007/s11227-022-04805-9