StoryBoard

What is the plan for defining the detailed book contents and the AVs needed?

Stage 1 is to develop a detailed Storyboard for the entire book. This can start with, for example, Cliff’s text, with all places where an activity called out (which should include all points where an algorithm’s behavior is described). Rough estimate is 100-200 activities and AVs needed. To help define what we want to see in the AVs, the Storyboard can include links to Java applets and URLs to non-Java AVs that already exist, along with descriptions for what needs to be changed in each one. As examples of what the Storyboard version might look like, see Virginia Tech’s hashing tutorial (http://research.cs.vt.edu/AVresearch/hashing/) and TRAKLA2’s heaps tutorial (http://svg.cs.hut.fi/heaptutorial/).

To illustrate the storyboard concept, Cliff Shaffer developed a detailed storyboard for a Shellsort tutorial. Ville Karavirta and Cliff Shaffer are working on an example implementations for the activities called for by the storyboard as well.

How can we put AVs into the storyboard?

While I mentioned above the possibilities of Java Applets and URLs in the Storyboard, this would not be at all ideal. Between the people already listed as interested in the project, we have a huge inventory of AVs. It would be nice to leverage them. JHAVE, ANIMAL, and ALVIE are all similar in that they are essentially generated from something like a scripting language. Perhaps it is possible to write XAAL translators for each of these? Ville has already written a XAAL to JavaScript outputter. So if we had the translators, then we would have a LOT of HTML5-compatible visualizations in a hurry. The only downside to this is that we might be to tempted to adopt existing AVs instead of improving them to some standard.