REDUCTION AND FLIP-ZOOMING IN COMPREHENSION-PRESERVING MINIATURES OF PROGRAM VISUALIZATIONS

摘要

One of the main problems to widely adopt animations in programming education is the difficulty of their production. We have developed a framework for program animation that reduces the user workload to a minimum. A key element of our framework is the simultaneous display of reductions of program visualizations (i.e. miniatures) so that the user can choose those most relevant to form an animation. The main problem, to preserve their comprehensibility, has been faced from several approaches. In this paper, we present two of them in their final form. Firstly, we present an algorithm that reduces the size of visualizations providing a good tradeoff between efficiency and readability. Secondly, we present a version of the flip-zoom technique to show simultaneously a set of miniatures and one of them (the current focus of attention) at natural size. Our version handles visualizations of different sizes and shapes. Our framework for program animation has been applied to functional programming and is implemented within the integrated programming environment WinHIPE.