LAVES: An Extensible Visualization Tool to Facilitate the Process of Learning and Teaching Algorithms

摘要

The Logistics Algorithms Visualization and Education Software (LAVES) is an open source project at the University of Siegen, aiming at supporting business and business informatics students in understanding the basic concepts of algorithms that are applied to solve problems arising in operations research, especially in logistics, by means of visualization. It allows students to create problem instances click-by-click with direct graphical feedback, offers a set of algorithm-related controls, presents execution-table-views as used by the students when manually processing algorithms, depicts and highlights the related pseudocode (including formulas), and includes an exercise mode. LAVES is accompanied by a development kit (LAVESDK) that allows instructors (with Java knowledge) to implement course-specific algorithm visualizations (called plugins) to be used with LAVES. The development kit is generic and provides a broad range of tools. In this paper, we present the basic features of LAVES and LAVESDK and report on first classroom experiences and student feedback.