Clifford A. Shaffer, Mayank Agarwal, Arpit Kumar, and Stephen H. Edwards. Going beyond algorithm visualization to algorithm exploration. Poster presented at the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. Portland, OR, USA, March 12-15, 2008.

While data structure and algorithm visualizations (AVs) have proved valuable to the CS education community, even the better AVs today are limited to instruction in the mechanics of how a given data structure or algorithm behaves. We discuss the value of going beyond the scope of such AVs to provide students with an opportunity to explore the relative merits of various alternatives. We call such artifacts “algorithm explorations.” As an illustration of what an algorithm exploration might look like, we describe a hashing tutorial that we have implemented.