A Novel Approach to Visualisations for Computer Science Education

Visualisations can be an invaluable help for educators and students in communicating computer science concepts. Unfortunately, the availability and accessibility of visualisations and their creation are lacking. Many existing tools are either outdated, unmaintained and/or distributed as Java applets, or specialise in specific areas of computer science (most commonly algorithms and data structures). Nevertheless, access to a good-quality visualisation of a concept can greatly benefit the education process. Most computer science concepts are not particularly complicated to implement, at least a simple model implementation would not be, but are much more difficult to explain. In this paper we present ‘Visual Machine’, a new system for visualising the execution of running programs, which should enable educators to create powerful and tangible visualisations for computer science education. By specialising in exactly what is interesting about the given implementation, this system can be adapted to anything from sorting algorithms to high-level concepts such as routing algorithms in a computer network or scheduling algorithms in an operating system. This system is driven by a key concept: The visualisations created have an actual, albeit simplified, implementation of the concept being taught running in the background.