Pedagogy and usability in interactive algorithm visualizations: Designing and evaluating CIspace

Interactive algorithm visualizations (AVs) are powerful tools for teaching and learning concepts that are difficult to describe with static media alone. However, while countless AVs exist, their widespread adoption by the academic community has not occurred due to usability problems and mixed results of pedagogical effectiveness reported in the AV and education literature. This paper presents our experiences designing and evaluating CIspace, a set of interactive AVs for demonstrating fundamental Artificial Intelligence algorithms. In particular, we first review related work on AVs and theories of learning. Then, from this literature, we extract and compile a taxonomy of goals for designing interactive AVs that address key pedagogical and usability limitations of existing AVs. We advocate that differentiating between goals and design features that implement these goals will help designers of AVs make more informed choices, especially considering the abundance of often conflicting and i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IWC
• Authors: Saleema Amershi, Giuseppe Carenini, Cristina Conati, Alan K. Mackworth, David Poole
• Keywords: Countless Avs, Interactive Avs, IWC 2008, Pedagogical Effectiveness