A system for building animated presentations over the web

Science of Computer …, 2004

2000

Web-based study resources can be viewed as a basic requirement in order to remain a competitive player on a more and more globalised educational market. For that reason it is getting increasingly important for universities to supplement offered lectures with additional Web-based learning material. In this paper we focus on interactive multimedia elements like computer animations and simulations, which can be used by students for individual experimentation. Such supplementary material represents a motivating but also a very effective chance to deepen and to increase the knowledge acquired in the lecture. This paper gives some general guidelines for building interactive Web-based animations. Beyond that, two of our developed animations are presented in detail. The first animation visualizes the search processes of some common direct global and local optimization strategies. In the second animation an artificial ecosystem is simulated, where several autonomous agents have to perform a number of different actions in order to survive. Our animations are realized as Java-applets, which have the advantage that they can be executed within Web browsers anywhere in the World at any time and without having to install anything.

2000

This paper provides a short review of the following basic approaches for generating animations so that teachers can determine the way best suited for them and be better prepared to select a tool addressing their needs: (1) using classical presentation tools such as PowerPoint; (2) visual editing using drag and drop or selection of options; (3) direct animation of source code; (4) using function calls implemented in a function library; and (5) animations generated by a scripting language or text commands. For each basic approach, several sample tools are cited. All selected tools are available for free use or download. (MES)

International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications

Attention control of audience is required for successful presentations, therefore giving a presentation with immediate reaction, called reactive presentation, to unexpected changes in the context given by the audience is important. Examples of functions for the reactive presentation are shape animation effects on slides and slide transition effects. Understanding the functions that realize the reactive presentation on the Web can be useful. In this work, we present an effective method for synchronizing shape animation effects on the Web, such as moving the objects and changing the size and color of the shape objects. The main idea is to make a video of animated slides, called Web Slide Media, including the page information of slides as movie chapter information for synchronization. Moreover, we explain a method to reduce the file size of the Web slide media by removing all shape animation effects and slide transition effects from a Web slide media item, called Sparse Web Slide Media. We demonstrate that the performance of the system is enough for practical use and the file size of the Sparse Web Slide Media is smaller than the file size of the Web Slide Media.

Journal of Universal Computer Science

Animation is commonly seen as an ideal tool for teaching dynamic phenomena. While there have been very few studies testing this hypothesis, animations are used extensively in teaching, particularly in the field of algorithms. We highlight features that we consider important for animation systems, describe the development of algorithm animation by examples, and present a new Java-based system supporting annotation and recording of animations. We also outline a way to annotate animations and movies given in the MPEG video format. By listing several case studies we describe new ways and possibilities of how animation systems may be used in the future.

2003

Abstract We present JAWAA 2.0, a scripting language for creating animations easily over the web. JAWAA includes primitives, easy creation of data structures and operations on these structures, and an editor for easy creation of complex objects. We show how to use JAWAA in a range of computer science courses including CS 0, CS 1, CS 2 and advanced courses. Instructors can quickly build animations for demos in lecture, and students can enhance their programming projects with an animation.

1995

This report describes our attempt to add animation as another data type to be used on the World Wide Web. Our current network infrastructure, the Internet, is incapable of carrying video and audio streams for them to be used on the web for presentation purposes. In contrast, object-oriented animation proves to be efficient in terms of network resource requirements. We defined an animation model to support drawing-based and frame-based animation.

International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 2008

This paper describes a system for generating animations of algorithms for use in the classroom. The animations emulate the individual steps of an algorithm in graphical form and can be posted to the Web. The system is based in Flash. In order to generate an animation the code of an algorithm is extended with annotations which generate the script code. We call our scripting language "Flashdance".

2004

Title and Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Algorithmic Animation in Education 2 Survey of Algorithmic Animation Platforms 3 Principles of Algorithmic Animation 4 Chalk Animator - Algorithmic Animation for an Electronic Chalkboard 5 Interactive Computer Driven Animation of Sketches 6 Flashdance - An Algorithmic Animation Platform for the Web 7 Conclusions and Future Work 8 Summary of Contributions References

1996

Abstract This paper describes two ways we have integrated algorithm animations into several computer science courses. First, we use previously existing animations during lectures to aid in explaining algorithms, and second, our students write programs with animations. Different types of animations are written depending on the level of the student.