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The effect of comparison cueing and exchange motion on comprehension of program visualizations

Published: 04 September 2006 Publication History

Abstract

We describe an experiment that evaluates the effect of two attributes of an algorithm animation: presence of cueing (flashing) to indicate to the viewer that two data elements have been compared, and type of animation (arcing move or grow/shrink) to indicate that two data elements have exchanged values. We evaluate the impact of these attributes both on perception of the animated changes and on viewer comprehension of the depicted algorithm, as measured by the number of correctly answered questions in two question sets: "traditional" (comprehension) questions and "popup" (perception) questions. No significant effect on comprehension was observed for either flash cueing or exchange motion, though we note that comparison and exchange behaviors were redundantly cued in the animation studied. Signficant effects were found for flash cueing and "move" versus "grow" in the perceptual questions displayed in popup windows.

References

[1]
Bartram, L. 2001. Enhancing Information Visualization with Motion. PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University.
[2]
Hundhausen, C., Douglas, S., and Stasko, J. T. 2002. A meta-study of algorithm visualization effectiveness. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing 13, 3, 259--290.
[3]
Kraemer, E. T., Reed, B., Rhodes, P., and Hamilton-Taylor, A. 2006. SSEA: A system for studying the effectiveness of animations. In Fourth Program Visualization Workshop, Florence, Italy.
[4]
Taylor, A. H., and Kraemer, E. 2002. Ska: Supporting algorithm and data structure discussion. ACM's 33rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education 34, 1, 58--63.

Cited By

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  • (2022)Enhancing Static Charts With Data-Driven AnimationsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.303730028:7(2628-2640)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
  • (2009)An Experiment on the Short-Term Effects of Engagement and Representation in Program AnimationJournal of Educational Computing Research10.2190/EC.39.4.e39:4(395-430)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2009
  • (2007)SSEAElectronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)10.1016/j.entcs.2007.01.048178(171-179)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2007

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cover image ACM Conferences
SoftVis '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Software visualization
September 2006
199 pages
ISBN:1595934642
DOI:10.1145/1148493
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 September 2006

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Author Tags

  1. empirical study
  2. perceptual attributes
  3. program visualization

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Overall Acceptance Rate 20 of 65 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Enhancing Static Charts With Data-Driven AnimationsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2020.303730028:7(2628-2640)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
  • (2009)An Experiment on the Short-Term Effects of Engagement and Representation in Program AnimationJournal of Educational Computing Research10.2190/EC.39.4.e39:4(395-430)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2009
  • (2007)SSEAElectronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)10.1016/j.entcs.2007.01.048178(171-179)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2007

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