Approaches to comprehension-preserving graphical reduction of program visualizations
F. Naharro-Berrocal, Cristóbal Pareja-Flores, Jaime Urquiza‐Fuentes, J. Ángel Velázquez‐Iturbide · 2002
Past research efforts on the educational effectiveness of software animations agree in the necessity of active involvement of users, i.e. students and teachers. However, one of the main obstacles is the technical difficulty to produce them. Our approach seeks to generate software animations analogously to the generation of documents in office applications. The availability of static visualizations allows the user to define animations friendly; thus, he/she can select the most relevant ones to illustrate meaningfully the algorithm. The selection is facilitated if (ideally) all the static visualizations are simultaneously shown to the user. This sets a novel problem: reducing the size of visualizations while preserving their comprehensibility. In this paper we describe the problem and identify the main difficulties. We think that there is no single solution to the problem. We describe several approaches to this problem, as well as our first, qualitative findings.