TM Home Page
Software Tools for Teaching and Learning
The Software Tools for Teaching and Learning Group is located within the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science of Memorial University in beautiful St. John's, Newfoundland. The group has produced two mature technologies, the Teaching Machine and webWriter++. The purpose of this site is to make them generally available.
They are mature in the sense that both are in everyday use in our own courses. Nevertheless, development of both is still ongoing. In addition, the group is investigating other tools including quizGen (an automatic generator for on-line quizzes), webLog (an online logbook) and pseudor (a pseudocode java generator).
The Teaching Machine
The Teaching Machine is a teaching and learning tool designed to harness the power of computers and the web to improve student's understanding of programming. It is based on, and designed to develop in students, a mental model of computing that we believe represents how experencied programmers see computers. It has been used as an aid to teach programming in the Faculty of Engineering at Memorial since 1999, with very positive results. The tool works by interactively animating C++ and Java programs. Written in Java, it can be run either as a stand-alone program or as an applet. See the Teaching Machine pages for further details.
WebWriter++
Where the Teaching Machine is aimed at students, WebWriter++ is written for instructors. It's a small authoring system designed to help instructors create interactive web pages for teaching computer programming with as little fuss as possible. Originally written to solve the problem of presenting programs on the web, it now contains a host of small convenience tools that make for more effective presentation of programming material, whether in the classroom, in printed notes or over the web. By design, it is coupled closely to the Teaching Machine so that the two tools should be viewed as a pair. See the webWriter++ pages for further details.
Sample Course
These are reference versions of the interactive, web-based lecture notes for three of our courses. They have been developed over many years and demonstrate virtually every technique we have found for using webWriter++ and the TM. See the courses page for further details.
Tutorial Pages
These are a few advanced tutorials intended for instructors interested in developing their own visualization plugIns..