1. How to use Algorithm Visualizations in Your Class Cliff Shaffer Virginia Tech Susan Rodger Duke University Tom Naps University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Steve Edwards Virginia Tech

2. Workshop Schedule Shaffer: Impediments, AlgoViz, interactivity Naps: JHAVE, quizzing Break Rodger: JFLAP in the classroom Edwards: AVs in CS2 Questions Session/AV Playtime

3. Get Acquainted Who’s who Have you used an AV for a class?

4. Survey Results: Interest Taken during SIGCSE 2010 Warning: Self-selected responders Are AVs useful? ◦ Strongly Agree: 12 ◦ Agree: 17 ◦ Neutral: 1 A (bare) majority indicated that they used some sort of visualization with class

5. Survey: Impediments to Use Lack of knowledge/time to find good AVs: 13 Time to make good AVs: 2 Difficulty integrating in class: 9 Lack of time within class constraints: 2 Uncertainty about quality outcomes: 1 Content not relevant to my classes: 1

6. Difficulty Integrating in Class Why is this so hard? Problems: ◦ Compatibility with existing materials ◦ Class time ◦ Your effort

7. Levels of Use Lecture aide: Just pick a couple to try Self-serve tutorial or exercise at home Lab session Light quizzing: Self study Heavy quizzing: collect and send to instructor (JHAVE, TRAKLA) A section of material: Ex: Hashing tutorial Integrated into a full course: JFLAP

8. Help from/for the Community http://algoviz.org/ ◦ Build a community of users/developers ◦ Better disseminate best practices information Project Support ◦ NSF CCLI grant ◦ NSF NSDL grant ◦ Connections to NSDL/Ensemble project

9. AlgoViz.org A collection of links to over 500AVs Annotated bibliography of over 500 papers Forums, field reports OpenAlgoViz

10. AlgoViz Tour

11. AlgoViz Site Traffic

12. AlgoViz Awards Community-building exercise Solicited votes from the public on a slate of nominees Six winners Hall of Fame: 6+1 Adding more for 2011 ◦ To be announced at the NSF showcase session on Friday morning

13. Levels of Interactivity Pure animation/slide show ◦ Sorting out Sorting Step-through ◦ Most AVs today Quizzing ◦ JHAVE is step-through + quizzing User-directed walkthrough ◦ TRAKLA Exploration Tutorials

14. My Classroom Experiences (1) My life as an AV researcher is divorced from my life as an instructor! Been intending for years to use AVs more in my Data Structures course and my senior Algorithms course

15. My Classroom Experiences (2) Until recently, only sporadic use ◦ Hashing tutorial excepted, since that was driven by a “research” agenda. But that worked well! This semester, frequent use of AVs in lecture ◦ Binary Treesome ◦ TRAKLA: Heaps, BST ◦ Auckland Huffman Coding ◦ VT Union/Find

16. Case Study: VT Hashing Tutorial One week of material on hashing Can replace lecture and textbook Drop in place, a complete unit Study: in-class study vs. lecture Significantly better performance on post test for tutorial group

17. AV Sampler Animal Backtracking (Tutorial/slideshow) Union/Find (lecture aide/step through) Binary Treesome (interactive) TRAKLA Heaps (Tutorial/interactive) VT Hashing (Tutorial, “test mode”, exploration) Algorithms in Action: Quicksort