Education should be easily accessible and available to all those that seek it. With this strong conviction, five students at the State University of New York at Stony Brook; Farid Kerimov, Gennadiy Vasilevskiy, Michael P. Epstein, Titus Oentario, and William Braynen, in the summer of 1997 got involved in Project Java to create a number of educational applets in areas ranging from Probability to Computer Science, as well as specific tools aimed to aid students in a wide range of fields. One such tool is a graphing applet that plots any graph given its equation. This latter piece of software can be used to aid students in Chemistry or Physics just as successfully as it could rhetorically be used in Mathematics. Another vital factor in learning is interaction. Two of our applets are designed to illustrate loop invariants, the understanding of which greatly helps students discover algorithms, as well as check their correctness. Conscious understanding and use of invariants eliminates the guess work usually associated with different parts of the iteration, such as initialization and its terminating condition or the order of operative statements in the body of the loop. Our applets bridge the gap between formal mathematics and the elusively intuitive; between theory and practice. The two invariants applets do so by not only serving as simultaneous algorithm and invariants animation, but by also enabling the user to interact with the algorithm, in our case a number of sorting routines. The student can interact with or observe the sorting algorithm working in real-time. Undoubtedly, our tools can greatly enhance the understanding of the material encountered in textbooks and lectures.
As far as availability goes, all of our applets are written in Java
1.1, which makes them easily accessible through the World Wide Web
and,
needless to say, all of our software is free of charge. As our
applets
are freely available, anyone also interested in the implementation of
our
software can view the source code on the Web.