Q&A

If you are interested in this page, most probably you are one of those computer science educators who look for using user-friendly materials in your classroom. It is also ok if you are a serious computer science student somewhere. Either way, you will welcome to tell us your comments if you think our work is helpful or you would like us to enhance our work.

Question

Does a new generator program need to be developed for a new algorithm?

Answer:

Yes. So, it is a very time consuming work. Fortunately, we are doing it. You will use it to teach to benefit the cs community.

 

Question

Can I generate my own slides based on my own data ?

Answer:

Yes. This platform makes its easy to do that for you. All you need to do is to submit your data in an intuitive format that most computer science people would agree.

Our platform will dispatch your submission to the right algorithm generator to generate slides for you. Once generated, you will get an email telling the link to download.

 

Question

Can I create my own slides generator ?

Answer:

Yes. It is time-consusming though. If you seriously want to develop one, we would like to know it so we won't reinvent the wheel.

 

Question

Is this approach better than others?

Answer:

Just a different approach and most likely the easiest approach for CS instructor to adopt.

Question

Is there any smooth animation?

Answer:

"I found the animation very entertaining"
- Steven Fortune

Probably this question can be answered better by another question. Why smooth animation can help better understand algorithms that manipulate discrete data structures? Probably discrete animation, achieved by a consecutive slides, should be sufficient for most time. To be better satisfied, everybody should know if you can make any smooth animation in PPT manually, we can make it progragrammingly, because it is supported by the API. So if smooth animation is expected for some reason, for some algorithms, we will try to implemented:)

 

Question

How to hand large dataset with limited size canvas of PPT

Answer:

For learning purpose, we CS instructors care about how to use non-trivial (more than a couple elements usually) moderately sized data to illustrate the idea.

For example, we do not have to use 1000 elements to illustrate how quick sort or heap sort works. Instead 15 elements or so may suffice to present the idea.

Question:

What are the benefits of using this approach?

Answer:

Too many. Just name a few for now. Standardized. Unified. You can print, you can nevigate back and force, you can edit it, which usually hard to do in other approach.

Question:

How to sustain this work?

Answer:

Surprisingly! This is an approach that cause minimum concern about the sustainability. Once generated, the presentation will be detached from the generator executables. That means, even exectuables will not be maintained ( we will actually because maintaining them is a unique learning experience for our students.), the slides generated can exist independently and editable. Anything wrong can be susequently correctedly manually. you can be of help to continue this extrememly coding intensive project!

Question:

How do you improve the generators?

Answer:

We recognize that all these samples, the generators that generated these samples, as well as this website itself will/can be further improved. Actually, the generators were fast prototyed by faculty and volunteer student programmers. But with adequate support, student programmers will be hired to refine the current generators and produce better generators for other algorithms! We strongly believe that this is going to a practical approach which can immediately benefit any CS instructors who teach these materials. The pilot research was explored by the group members who have been enthuasiastic to this novel approach. As CS educators, you already can tell the proposed project is very programming labor intensive. Each algorithm needs a separate generator, which will be coded by our faculty or capable senior students. If we do not do it, these materials will never exist!

Question:

How can I be of help?

Answer:

There are many ways. You can just adopt the materials for your teaching. You can provide us feedback so we can improve our work. You an also create generators for new algorithms. You can join us in debugging our software. You can also just browse the slides yourself and provide your insightful comments. Your feedback could be helpful to keep us investing more time on this long-term project. Show your support! Together, let us do something for the CS undergraduate educators. Contact us if you want to join the project! Thanks for your support again!

Question:

How this thing works

Answer

It's simple. Each generator has a page where you can request a presentation. Each generator also has a specific input format. For example, Huffman Encoding just takes a sentence as input where Depth First Traversal takes an XML formatted input. You can view the specific format for each generator on the generator's page. Our platform for distributing visualization materials of data structures and algorithm is this website. Users can register and request presentations simply by following the input format for each generator


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