How do students use program visualizations within an interactive ebook?

We investigated students' use of program visualizations (PVs) that were tightly integrated into the electronic book of an introductory course on programming. A quantitative analysis of logs showed that most students, and beginners especially, used the PVs, even where the PV did not directly affect their grade. Students commonly spent more time studying certain steps than others, suggesting they used the PVs attentively. Nevertheless, substantial numbers of students appeared to gloss over some key animation steps, something that future improvements to pedagogy may address. Overall, the results suggest that integrating PVs into an ebook can promote student engagement and has been fairly successful in the studied context. More research is needed to understand the differences between our results and earlier ones, and to assess the generalizability of our findings.