Automatic generation of algorithm animations in a programming environment

The design and analysis of algorithms is one of the core fields of computer science, and their study is an intellectually demanding task. Animations are promising educational aids for the study of algorithms, but the main obstacle for an extensive educational use is the technical difficulty of producing them. This fact dissuades many teachers and most students from building animations. We report the facilities for algorithm animation we have integrated in a functional programming environment. One of our main concerns was to simplify the generation of animations to the extent of being as simple as handling an office application. In addition, the integration of animation generation with the programming environment produces synergy benefits. From the point of view of user interaction, our programming environment allow one to produce automatically, graphical, customizable visualizations of different instants of the algorithm execution. In a second step, an animation is built by arranging sequentially such visualizations, as a cartoons.