- University Of Missouri

- University Of Arizona 

- Computer Society

G-92 Developers Group

Prepared by Boo Murray
National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum

This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Cooperative Agreement
#H326K02003).

This report was developed by CAST through a subcontract agreement with the Access Center:
Improving Outcomes for All Student K-8 at the American Institutes for Research.

Belarmino Adenso - Diaz

Escuela Superior de Ingenieros Industriales, Campus de Viesques,
Universidad de Oviedo, 33204-Gijon (Spain)
HTUadenso@etsiig.uniovi.es

Manuel Laguna

Leeds School of Business
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0419
HTUlaguna@colorado.edu
Tel. (303) 492-6368 Fax. (303) 492-5962

Researchers and practitioners frequently spend more time fine-tuning algorithms
than designing and implementing them. This is particularly true when developing heuristics
and metaheuristics, where the “right” choice of values for search parameters has a
considerable effect on the performance of the procedure.

QuickTime® movies provide students of computational geometry with a useful pedagogical tool that helps them to follow, implement and analyze algorithms. QuickTime movies can include explanatory text to support the visualization, breakpoints to stop the visualization for student interaction, and the ability to rewind, fast-forward and move step-by-step through the visualization. QuickTime Virtual Reality movies provide an additional element of interactivity.
We introduce here a suite of visualizations spanning many algorithms for many topics in computational geometry, offering thereby to stimulate discussion and debate on the pedagogical merits of this technique.