Visualizing Algorithms: Interactive Pedagogical Tools for Algorithmic Understanding

Abstract

PrairieLearn exercises used in COS226 allow students to revisit recently discussed concepts and lecture topics. The format of these questions are rather passive in that they prompt students to fill in multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. This limits engagement and ultimately leads to looser retention, defeating the purpose of these exercises. This project would provide additional, more interactive formats to promote active learning by enabling students to directly manipulate data structures by allowing them to drag nodes into tries, insert values into queues, and perform removal operations on tree. In order for these alternative approaches to be implemented, custom visualization templates and interactive logic will have to be built on top of PrairieLearn's default templates. In order to evaluate how effective the questions are, both quantitative student feedback and instructional reviews will be monitored. Once these questions are integrated, expectations will involve higher satisfaction and more effective retention of data-structure and algorithm questions.