Animation tool kit for computer science education on the Internet

Animation Tool Kit for Computer Science Education (ATCSE) on the Internet is presented. ATCSE was developed to provide a multimedia based scaffolded frame-work to assist in the instruction of computer science courses through visual animation. ATCSE at its present stage aids in teaching ‘loops’ and ‘arrays’ in the ‘C’ and ‘Pascal’ programming languages. The animated representation of what occurs when a loop is executed or an array is initialized, for example, offers an improved learning environment compared to the static imagery of print. By developing ATCSE in the Java programming language, users can access the system from any place on the World Wide Web through Java capable browsers.; Two experiments were conducted using human subjects at the University of Regina to evaluate the performance of ATCSE. The results demonstrate that ATCSE aids in providing assistance to novices learning programming concepts.