Algorithm animations typically assist in educational tasks aimed simply at achieving understanding. Potentially, animations could assist in higher levels of cognition, such as the analysis level, but they usually fail in providing this support because they are not flexible or comprehensive enough. In particular, animations of recursion provided by educational systems hardly support the analysis of recursive algorithms. Here we show how to provide full support to the analysis of recursive algorithms. From a technical point of view, animations are enriched with interaction techniques inspired by the information visualization (InfoVis) field. Interaction tasks are presented in seven categories, and deal with both static visualizations and dynamic animations. All of these features are implemented in the SRec system, and visualizations generated by SRec are used to illustrate the article
This chapter advocates for an approach to constructing educational tools that consists in designing small systems aimed at achieving clear educational goals and evaluating them in actual teaching situations. The authors addressed this approach with a number of small systems. In this chapter, they describe their experience in the development, use, and evaluation of two educational systems: SRec and GreedEx. The former is a highly interactive program animation system of recursion, and the latter is an interactive assistant aimed at learning the role of selection functions in greedy algorithms by means of experimentation. The evaluations allowed the authors to identify faults and weaknesses of the systems, and these results were used to enhance the systems. Moreover, their approach has yielded very high values with respect to effectiveness and student satisfaction.
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