Educational Aspects
Peter A. Gloor · Birkhäuser Boston eBooks · 1997
Algorithm animations support students in various learning situations: Motivation enhancement . Through appealing presentation of the complex material, students are better motivated to study complicated subjects. In addition, the ease of access to cross-references by hypertext removes barriers to an in-depth understanding of the topic being studied [Ste91]. Skill mastery through additional practice opportunities . Students get a new way to experience algorithms. In addition to doing paper exercises and writing programs, they can perceive algorithms visually and study their features by watching and interacting with animations [Law94]. Development of analytic skills . Algorithm animations assist in the development of analytic skills, as students are asked to collect their own data for algorithm analysis and subsequent design of improved algorithms. Provision of additional context knowledge . The hypertext reference provides easy access to the whole field of algorithms. By offering linking and path mechanisms, it encourages the student to browse in related topics and to explore additional subjects. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.