A JAVA FUNCTION VISUALIZER

Visualization is an important tool for student learning. The Function Visualizer provides a resource that permits the visualization of function calls for any set of Java functions. It provides a control panel where the user specifies the speed of the visualization and the parameter values for the initial function call. When the visualization begins, lines of code are highlighted in a function window as they are executed and when another function is called, a new window appears on top of the previous one, producing a visualization of the function call stack. This tool provides a flexible and intuitive visualization aid for the teaching of recursion. INTRODUCTION Visualization is an important classroom tool. All teachers use it to help their students “see” difficult concepts. A recent overview paper [1] listed many motivating factors for the use of visualization including better learning, attracting student attention, faster coverage of topics, increased student understanding, encouraging under-prepared students, facilitating debugging, and using classroom time efficiently. There are many opportunities for visualization in Computer Science instruction and it is natural to use the computer to generate such visualizations dynamically and interactively. Work in Computer Science instructional visualization has been focused on two specific areas: program visualization and algorithm animation. A taxonomy of the former category is found in [5] and