pseuCo Book: An Interactive Learning Experience

Abstract

Software tools and apps are pervading educational technology in many areas, not least in the field of computer science education. However, many of these tools have a very narrow scope and lack context, or only work as add-ons to textbooks and other course materials. This paper advocates an alternative: a truly interactive textbook experience where interactive demonstrations and exercises are interwoven with more classical textual elements. We present a framework that provides authors with the infrastructure for writing such books, and present pseuCo Book, an interactive book for teaching concurrent programming. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by a user study encompassing a detailed empirical evaluation.