Assessing the utility of an interactive electronic book for learning the Pascal programming language

Hypermedia is a broadly accepted technique to develop educational systems since its hypertext structure reflects a model of learning based on the students´ semantic memory model and the use of multimedia provides interactive mechanisms that allow managing, manipulating and organizing the lessons. A hypermedia electronic book called CIPP (Curse Interactive de Programacion en Pascal) is introduced to help students learn the Pascal programming language and the empirical evaluation that was carried out to assess the book utility as an educational tool. One of the most encouraging results from this experience was that, at the end of the course, not only did most students agree with the didactic method which integrated lectures with the use of the electronic book, but also they felt motivated to continue learning Pascal by themselves.