jGRASP: Teaching Hard Concepts with Intuitive Visualizations at the CCSC

Dr. James Cross presented jGRASP, the Java virtual machine version of the Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures and Processes in his workshop jGRASP: Teaching Hard Concepts with Intuitive Visualizations at the CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference held at Colorado Technical University (CTU).

jGRASP is funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Previous research on GRASP was supported by NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Defense Information Systems Agency DISA) and Lockheed Martin.

Download and use a free copy of jGRASP and the tutorials in Windows, Mac or Linus formats. This visual tool is easy to use by dragging and dropping program elements into a viewer window.

CCSC Workshop on Animated Database Courseware and Gamemaker for Game Development

Yesterday at the CCSC Rocky Mountain Conference at CTU, Dr. Mario Guimaraes led a riveting presentation of how they use the 2D game design tool Gamemaker in An Exploratory Overview of Teaching Computer Game Development. He noted that Gamemaker is available by a free download. It is easy for students to use and best for designing 2D games.

Today, his workshop on Incorporating Animation Courseware into the Teaching of Complex Database Concepts: Conference Workshop demonstrated how to integrate Flash and Java to animate the entity-relationship notations to depict various ways of learning how to model and understand a relational database design. Visit the Animated DataBase Courseware research site to experience animated instruction and the assessment of advanced database concepts.