VT-revolution: Interactive programming tutorials made possible

Lingfeng Bao*, Zhenchang Xing, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

    2 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Programming video tutorials showcase programming tasks and associated workflows. Although video tutorials are easy to create, it is often difficult to explore the captured workflows and interact with the programs in the videos. In this work, we propose a tool named VTRevolution - an interactive programming video tutorial authoring system. VTRevolution has two components: 1) a tutorial authoring system leverages operating system level instrumentation to log workflow history while tutorial authors are creating programming video tutorials; 2) a tutorial watching system enhances the learning experience of video tutorials by providing operation history and timeline-based browsing interactions. Our tutorial authoring system does not require any special recording tools or instrumentation of target applications. Neither does it incur any additional burden on tutorial authors to add interactions to video tutorials. Given a video tutorial enriched with synchronously-logged workflow history, our tutorial watching system allows tutorial watchers to explore the captured workflows and interact with files and code in a way that is impossible for video data alone. We conduct a user study of 90 developers to evaluate the design and effectiveness of our system in helping developers learn programming knowledge in video tutorials.

    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationESEC/FSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European So ftware Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of So ftware Engineering
    EditorsAlessandro Garci, Corina S. Pasareanu, Gary T. Leavens
    PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
    Pages924-927
    Number of pages4
    ISBN (Electronic)9781450355735
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 26 Oct 2018
    Event26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2018 - Lake Buena Vista, United States
    Duration: 4 Nov 20189 Nov 2018

    Publication series

    NameESEC/FSE 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

    Conference

    Conference26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2018
    Country/TerritoryUnited States
    CityLake Buena Vista
    Period4/11/189/11/18

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