Engaging students with active learning resources

Animating automata

“…In the spirit of Fred B r o o k s ' rule, "plan to t h r o w one away" [5], Version 2 of the F S A Simulator was completely redesigned and rewritten from the g r o u n d up in order to overcome the design flaws of t h e first version [3]. T h e m a j o r goals of the rewrite were to decouple the internal r e p r e s e n t a t i o n of an F S A f r o m its graphical representation, to take a d v a n t a g e of new features available in J a v a 2, and to m a k e the f r a m e w o r k extensible to other models of c o m p u t a t i o n .…”

“…While this animation program is being tailored to work well by itself, it is also being designed to integrate seamlessly with other web and Javabased educational materials (e.g. hypertextbooks [3]). …”

Loving to learn theory

“…However, in spite of the fact that many good interactive educational systems have been developed for various topics in computer science, it is well known that these systems are not widely used. This problem and possible solutions have been discussed in the literature before (see, for example, [2]). The two most important issues are • platform independence • courseware integration If active learning software is developed for a specific platform (e.g., Windows XP on a PC) it automatically excludes users who have a different platform (e.g., Mac OS on a Macintosh).…”

“…We have developed active learning applets for each of these models to incorporate into a h y p e r t e x t b o o k which we call Snapshots of the Theory o] Computing (we have reported on the h y p e r t e x t b o o k and some of these applets earlier [2], but all have since undergone substantial revision and enhancement). We discuss each applet below, and then we describe how these are to be integrated into a comprehensive teaching and learning resource.…”

Realizing the promise of visualization in the theory of computing

“…Among these, only a few represent concerted efforts to produce comprehensive resources to support an entire course or course module on the theory of computing. Most notable are the works of Susan Rodger [Akingbade et al 2003;Hung and Rodger 2000] and those of the authors of this article [Boroni et al 1999;Boroni et al 2001;Grinder et al 2002]. (Readers are especially encouraged to visit http://www.cs.duke.edu/~rodger/tools/tools.html, home of Susan Rodger's theory tools web site.…”