Comparative academic performance using a Java Ultra-Lightweight Interpreter (JULI) for teaching introductory programming

A Java subset interpreter was developed for an undergraduate Introduction to Programming course. The interpreter is targeted specifically at complete beginner programmers and addresses aspects relevant or troublesome to novices, such expressions, method calls, method calls as sub-expressions, and recursion. The interpreter was used in a semester of introductory programming for the first 5 weeks of a 12 week course. BlueJ was used for the second half of the semester. An analysis of the impact on learning by measuring student achievement on assessment items was done.

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