Motivational Value of Navigation Support Case of Annotated Code Examples Independent Study Report

A. WebEx Interface WebEx, a Web-based tool for interactive exploration of programming examples, was designed to overcome the problems listed above. A program example in WebEx appears to be just the same as it looked in a program editor (Figure 1). The only visible difference is the presence of green or white navigation bullets to the left of each line. A green bullet indicates the availability of explanations for this line of code. A white bullet marks that there are no explanations for that line. Clicking on a green bullet opens an explanations note for the selected line. In the spirit of good hypertext, the WebEx interface lets the user use his or her preferred browsing strategy. Some users may choose to browse the example line by line. Other students may concentrate on the most hard-to-understand lines and selectively read explanations for these lines. When exploring an example, such students can go straight to a troublesome line while ignoring other unnecessary explanations.