title: "A Direct Manipulation Language for Explaining Algorithms"
authors: Jeremy Scott, Philip J. Guo, Randall Davis
venue: IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), short paper
year: 2014

tweet: A visual language makes it easier to create CS algorithm animations than manually drawing diagrams

abstract: >
  Instructors typically explain algorithms in computer science by tracing
  their behavior, often on blackboards, sometimes with algorithm
  visualizations. Using blackboards can be tedious because they do not
  facilitate manipulation of the drawing, while visualizations often
  operate at the wrong level of abstraction or must be laboriously
  hand-coded for each algorithm. In response, we present a direct
  manipulation (DM) language for explaining algorithms by manipulating
  visualized data structures. The language maps DM gestures onto primitive
  program behaviors that occur in commonly taught algorithms. We performed
  an initial evaluation of the DM language on teaching assistants of an
  undergraduate algorithms class, who found the language easier to use and
  more helpful for explaining algorithms than a standard drawing
  application (GIMP).

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{ScottVLHCC2014,
   author = {Scott, Jeremy and Guo, Philip J. and Davis, Randall},
   title = {A Direct Manipulation Language for Explaining Algorithms},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)},
   series = {VL/HCC '14},
   publisher = {IEEE},
   year = {2014},
   pages = {45--48},
  }