CLIENT- SERVER SYSTEM FOR WEB-BASED VISUALIZATION AND ANIMATION OF LEARNING CONTENT

• Main Author: LU, Zheng
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/7572/7/20180712ClassicThesis.pdf; LU, Zheng <http://tuprints.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/view/person/LU=3AZheng=3A=3A.html> : CLIENT- SERVER SYSTEM FOR WEB-BASED VISUALIZATION AND ANIMATION OF LEARNING CONTENT. Technische Universität, Darmstadt [Ph.D. Thesis], (2018)

E-learning is an effective means for academic and continuous education nowadays. An important feature of E-learning is using animation to demonstrate the teaching contents. With the increasing popularity of multimedia technology, instructors started to demonstrate the complicated computer algorithms and abstract data structure using multimedia animation. As a result, Algorithm Visualization (AV) is one of the most frequently used tools in E-learning. Numerous researches showed that applying animations to illustrate complex algorithms enables students to understand these algorithms better and faster. But there are also many teachers who oppose the usage of AV in the teaching process. In order to make AV help students better in understanding the topics they need to learn, certain guidelines need to be considered while designing AV animations. After reading and analysing a large number of related papers, four pedagogic theories were selected. These are Epistemic Fidelity, Cognitive Constructivism, Dual Coding and Individual Differences. It is believed that if developers observe these four learning theories when developing AV animation, the quality of AV can be effectively improved. An on-line platform named DLD-VISU for learning and teaching Digital Logic Design was developed based on these four theories. Specific implementation concepts and methods were developed in order to support these theories in DLD-VISU using advanced software engineering and programming techniques. DLD-VISU uses the MVC architectural pattern to achieve the separation of Model, Controller and View and uses the Dependency Injection (DI) method to achieve Inversion of Control (IoC). This can decouple classes and greatly reduce the difficulty of program maintenance and update. In addition, we use the Object Relational Mapping (ORM) technology to replace the traditional JDBC to access database. DLD-VISU is not only able to display animation on web pages, but also serves as an AV development platform. It provides a powerful framework and a rich library of graphical functions. This framework encapsulates many powerful functions such as IoC, ORM and Action dispatcher. Developers can use it to quickly build an AV animation based on the MVC architectural pattern. An extensive library of graphical functions can help developers to draw the front-end animations fast. In order to present the ease-of-use of DLD-VISU, we use it to develop AV animation for different algorithms of binary decision trees as an important class of machine learning classifiers. Another objective of DLD-VISU is to construct unified AV management platform. All the animations on this platform employ the same style and GUI, which can spare the time that students spend to adapt to different AV programs. Furthermore, the platform provides a great amount of management modules that make it very convenient for teachers to publish and manage their own AV programs and perform real-time observation and analysis of student's learning using AV. We conducted a series of tests on this platform, including dividing the students into two groups — one utilized the DLD-VISU platform and the other employed traditional methods, and testing both groups of students with same questions. The results show that DLD-VISU is helpful for improving students' achievements.