WWWIC Visual Program Development Project

Welcome Active Images Screen Captures Presentations NDSU CS724 (AI) WWWIC Home Page

The Visual Program is a development project of the North Dakota State University World Wide Web Instructional Committee (WWWIC). Major support for the Visual Program development is being provided by a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The title of the grant is: A Shared Developmental Environment for Science-based Courseware. This project is one of three the committee is managing. The titles of the other two projects are: Geology Explorer and Virtual Cell. The goal of the project is to produce visualization tools to help students to understand programs and algorithms. We are providing more engaging visualizations that engage view at one or more levels. We are using animation, fly through 3D images and interactive images to provide critical information to the viewer/participant with the image. This modes of presentation and interaction will show the behavior of the programs over time and will allow the user to see patterns in the behaver. At this point we have produced a number of packaged visualization to help in understanding a concept or process (such as searching). We have also developed tools to allow the user to easily produce visualizations for their own programs. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) and Java were chosen as the environment to deliver the visualizations. This environment allows the Visual Program project to deliver images and tools to almost any computer and yet allows flexibly in the product and its interactions with the user. For more information you can contact Paul Juell, one of the project co-managers. Copyright © 1998. World Wide Web Instructional Committee