Creating Interactive Experiences and Visualizing Computer Science Concepts to aid Student Understanding

Abstract

Computer Science courses at MIT typically include lectures, recitations, and a handful of problem sets, quizzes, and exams. We believe that an essential middle step is missing among these. One between the stage of teaching where concepts are initially introduced, and the stage of learning where mastery of those concepts are applied & tested. This middle step should be interactive, fun, engaging, and function to allow students to play around with the concepts they learn, without having them build their own tools from scratch. For example, when we first introduce graph search in an intro to computational thinking class, although we use a variety of visual aids, we never give the students a way to run and visualize the algorithms in action on some examples. We have them write code that eventually builds up to that point; but we argue that offering them a tool to master concepts, such as the patterns of various graph search algorithms, before they have to code it up, would lead to a better grasp of the material. In this thesis we introduce a set of tools called Sandboxes to provide this functionality for the key concepts covered in the course 6.100B: Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science.