DRUIDS: tools for understanding data structures and algorithms

A clear understanding of data structures and their associated algorithms is highly desirable for engineers. Programming subjects usually rely on static methods such as overhead transparencies, blackboards and textbooks to illustrate operations on data structures, while laboratory environments rarely provide the graphical support students need to experiment with algorithms. The system discussed, DRUIDS (Display Resource for Understanding Internal Data Structures), establishes a link between instruction and experiment by animating textbook algorithms applied to common data structures, and by allowing the student to exercise their own program code. The resulting changes to the program state can be viewed dynamically at several levels of abstraction, including flow of program control, variable tracing and data structure state.<>