The whiteboard environment: an electronic sketchpad for data structure design and algorithm description

Abstract

Most instructors describe algorithms and data structures to students using a physical blackboard or a whiteboard and chalk or markers. This paper describes two tools, Data Structure Designer and Whiteboard, that provide an instructor with the functionality of a whiteboard. The environment provided by these tools improve upon a whiteboard by providing interactivity and dynamic capabilities that whiteboards lack. Data Structure Designer provides a direct manipulation, graphical editor, similar to a widget-editor, that allows users to create attractive, customized data structure objects that very closely resemble the pictures of data structures that appear in textbooks. The Whiteboard environment provides a drawing area where data structures created in the Data Structure Designer can be interactively drawn, populated with example data, and then used in the demonstration of algorithms. Built-in semantics facilitate common operations. For example, assignment is accomplished by dragging and dropping a variable onto another variable. These two tools make the interactive design of data structures and demonstration of algorithms fast and easy.