We are looking forward to the upcoming SIGCSE 2012 conference in Raleigh, NC, March 1-3. AlgoViz will once again share a booth in the exhibition hall with Ensemble, the NSDL pathway for Computing Education. We will also host a Birds-of-a-Feather session on eTextbooks. Finally, we have two posters, one on using deduced social networks to improve search results such as from our catalog, and another on our OpenDSA eTextbook project.

If you are there, please stop by and say hello!

We are pleased to announce the start of a new project to provide algorithm visualization to the CS education community. OpenDSA seeks make available a complete active electronic textbook for data structures and algorithms courses.

Our fundamental premises are:

• This is an open source, creative commons collaborative. We hope that many people will eventually participate and contribute.
• All materials are modifiable and replaceable. You can pick and choose what you can make use of. Thus, the infrastructure that we use needs to support a creative commons where users can put together those pieces that they want to use to create teaching resources.
• Our hypertextbook vision tightly integrates
  1. textbook-quality text and graphics with
  2. interactive visualizations and exercises
  3. assessment support.

Its not a hypertextbook without all three of those components.

The eventual goal is complete materials that instructors can use to teach a topic or an entire course.

For an overview of the project vision, see:

C.A. Shaffer, T.L. Naps, and E. Fouh, Truly Interactive Textbooks for Computer Science Education, in Proceedings of the Sixth Program Visualization Workshop, June 30, 2011, Darmstadt, Germany.

You can get more information about OpenDSA at the OpenDSA Wiki and at the OpenDSA Forum.

We invite you to join the project!

AlgoViz now uses a customized ranking mechanism to order the results of a catalog search. As a result, you should now see higher-rated entries at the top of the list. Compared to our earlier system, which sorted the entries alphabetically, this new system will help you to find visualizations that best fit your needs.

AlgoViz.org has implemented a badging program to acknowledge the contributions of its members.

Many common activities that you do at the site will earn credit toward new badges.

This lets other users see who are the active members and contributing citizens on the site.

The following badges are now available: