Memview: A Pedagogically-Motivated Visual Debugger
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Novice programmers often have difficulty understanding the interactions between the objects in their programs. Many studies have shown that visual representations of computer memory can aid students' comprehension. One such representation, developed by Gries and Gries, divides computer memory into three areas: one for the call stack, one for static objects allocated on the heap ("static space"), and one for normal heap objects ("object space"). Memview, an extension to the DrJava IDE developed at Rice University, is a dynamic, interactive display of computer memory based on this model. Its simple three-pane representation shows novices the life cycle of objects, and helps them understand three key concepts: the notion of an "address" in memory, how storing an address creates a reference from one object to another, and the differences between the heap, the stack, and static space. User tests conducted during the summer of 2004 demonstrated that Memview facilitated faster completion of common introductory programming problems. Since then, Memview has been used in an introductory programming course to illustrate basic data structures such as linked lists. We are presently refining the tool based on further feedback from students and instructors
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it