Effectiveness of Combining Algorithm and Program Animation: A Case Study with Data Structure Course

Abstract

Data Structure is an important and mandatory course in Computer Science and Information Technology curricula. The topics of the course require detailed view of the algorithm behavior with the implementation part by a programming language. This paper introduces a visualized learning environment and assesses the effectiveness of using this system in order to enhance the education in computer science and information technology concerning data structure course. Whether the use of the system will produce remarkable enough affects to encourage the developers to enhance such systems. The system uses embedded visualizer rather than external visualizer to produce the animation. The significant result of the experiment indicates that combining Algorithm and Program Animation is an effective way to enhance students' performance.