The conventional way of teaching IT is increasingly not attractive to students of today. For example, covering the various topics in Computer Science is not exactly exciting when students are taught the theory and the...
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The conventional way of teaching IT is increasingly not attractive to students of today. For example, covering the various topics in Computer Science is not exactly exciting when students are taught the theory and then asked to practice by coming up with solutions to "made-up" problems. These solutions then get discarded when they move on to a new topic. A computer game can involve most and possibly all topics in Computer Science. When working on computer games, instead of discarding solutions that students worked on earlier, students learn to incorporate solutions to previous problems into newer solutions. The final product is a lot more sophisticated and students can actually feel proud of what they have achieved. They can also have enjoyed themselves along the way. They would have learnt that topics they have studied had a purpose. This is useful, as quite often, students cannot figure out why they need to study a particular topic, especially if they are finding it hard. In this paper, we suggest that game construction can be an effective learning tool.
This workshop will focus on using the new jGRASP viewer canvas which provides an exciting new dimension to dynamic program visualization. The canvas allows students and instructors to organize dynamic viewers of multi...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450326056
This workshop will focus on using the new jGRASP viewer canvas which provides an exciting new dimension to dynamic program visualization. The canvas allows students and instructors to organize dynamic viewers of multiple objects and primitives to quickly form coherent program visualizations. Students can quickly build and save visualizations of their own programs, and faculty can create visualizations and provide them to students with example programs. "Playing" a program in canvas mode brings the visualization to life as objects come into scope and the canvas is updated automatically. All educators who teach Java will benefit from this workshop. It will be especially suitable for instructors who teach CS1 (introduction to programming), CS2 (introduction to data structures), and CS3 (introduction to algorithms), as well as for instructors of AP courses in high schools. jGRASP is a freely available educational IDE (http://***/); no prior experience with jGRASP is expected. Laptop required.
We present interactive software designed to support students' exploration of concepts involving Huffman coding. This software illustrates the association between binary codewords and paths in a Huffman tree, the g...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450318686
We present interactive software designed to support students' exploration of concepts involving Huffman coding. This software illustrates the association between binary codewords and paths in a Huffman tree, the greedy algorithm that is used to construct an optimal tree, and the use of the tree in the decoding process. It allows the user to control the input upon which the code is built, to step forward and backward through an animation of the algorithm process for constructing a tree, and to choose data to encode or decode. We have used this software with students in an introductory computing principles course, a first-year data structures course, and an upper-level algorithms course. The software is publicly available as a Java applet at http://***/~goldwasser/demos/huffman.
What should the textbook of tomorrow look like in a world of ubiquitous access to computing? Hypertextbooks have proved difficult to create and been fundamentally passive experiences. Commercial eBooks are merely book...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450310987
What should the textbook of tomorrow look like in a world of ubiquitous access to computing? Hypertextbooks have proved difficult to create and been fundamentally passive experiences. Commercial eBooks are merely books printed on an electronic screen instead of paper. New technologies such as HTML5 make it feasible to develop interactive applications that integrate with web services to provide a rich, pedagogically effective learning environment compatible with a range of computing platforms. We seek to generate discussion by participants to describe what they hope to see in online textbooks in the near future, and what resources and support would be required for them to adopt such a thing into their own courses.
Visualization systems are complex dynamic software systems. Debugging such systems is difficult using conventional debuggers because the programmer must try to imagine the three-dimensional geometry based on a list of...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780780358973
Visualization systems are complex dynamic software systems. Debugging such systems is difficult using conventional debuggers because the programmer must try to imagine the three-dimensional geometry based on a list of positions and attributes. In addition, the programmer must be able to mentally animate changes in those positions and attributes to grasp dynamic behaviors within the algorithm. In this paper we shall show that representing geometry, attributes, and relationships graphically permits visual pattern recognition skills to be applied to the debugging problem. The particular application is a particle system used for isosurface extraction from volumetric data. Coloring particles based on individual attributes is especially helpful when these colorings are viewed as animations over successive iterations in the program. Although we describe a particular application, the types of tools that we discuss can be applied to a variety of problems.
In this paper we introduce the concept of conflictive animations and discuss its applicability in programming and algorithm design courses. Conflictive animations are animations that deviate from the expected behaviou...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781920682699
In this paper we introduce the concept of conflictive animations and discuss its applicability in programming and algorithm design courses. Conflictive animations are animations that deviate from the expected behaviour of the program or algorithm they are supposed to present. With respect to the engagement taxonomy, we propose several ways of learning with conflictive animations. We also initiate a discussion about their possible benefits and drawbacks.
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