ANIMATING RECURSION AS AN AID TO INSTRUCTION

This paper presents a method for overcoming one of the most difficult problems in teaching programming to first-year university students, na mely recursion. It is established that what is required to understand recursion is an abstracted mental model of recursive flow of control. The model which is deemed most suitable for the purposes of this resea rch is the copies model of recursion. In this model recursive instanti ations are seen as copies of the recursive function. In order to prese nt this model to students, a program (as opposed to data or algorithm) animator is employed. This animator takes any Pascal program containi ng a recursive function and presents the student with a dynamic copies model of the recursive function.