Data Structure Visualization on the Web
Lin Juan, Hui Zhang · 2020
One challenge remains in teaching and learning data structure is to facilitate students’ understanding of the dynamic presentation from the collection of data elements in memory. Visualizing how each element points to the next, and how a collection of nodes together represent a sequence with graphs or linked-node diagram can help us understand not only the abstract data structure but also the dynamics of the data elements in the program execution. While printing (to a console) is a very common technique for understanding and debugging data structures, we in this paper presents an interactive visualization tool for data structure in Python. Our work focuses on visual and interactive methods to facilitate the communication of data structure and associated data operations by dynamic graphing corresponding to the programming process. By using the inner execution trace, our proposed method can monitor the run-time data structure change and render the corresponding presentation in real-time. The resulting serial of key frames featuring major data structure transformation are available for review and analysis. All these combine to fill the gap between the abstract data representation and a dynamic learning-by-coding process.