  Even relatively simple code analysis can be a daunting task for many first
year students. Perceived complexity, coupled with foreign and harsh syntax,
often outstrips the ability for students to take in what they are seeing in
terms of their verbal memory. That is, first year students often lack the
experience to encode critical building blocks in source code, and their
interrelationships, into their own words. We believe this argues for the need
for IDEs to provide additional support for representations that would appeal
directly to visual memory. In this paper, we examine this need for intuitive
source code visualization tools that are easily accessible to novice
programmers, discuss the requirements for such a tool, and suggest a novel idea
that takes advantage of human peripheral vision to achieve stronger overall
code structure awareness.
