I really enjoyed the animation article but rather than sumerizing it, I am going to add some of my tangentially related thoughts..

I firmly believe that animations help some students. I do not feel as though they are the panacea for algorithmic confusion. Students who do well with visualization find that method as very helpful to their learning style. [Note: Although XTango does not present a way to do anything but go forward and pause, most current techniques do allow one to go back and I feel that it importnant.] With this in mind, I also feel that text based explanations and hand simulations are important for some. The presented experiment did not take into thought the idea that people learn differently although they did note how animation participants felt about the project. I feel as though the most important response was the individuals who said that the animations grabbed their interest (visual and kinestetic learners). It is important to draw people into the process. In the reverse, the students who noted that they had difficulty remember the concept and those who wanted explanations are obviously not the types of learners who do best by such systems (language learners). It is important to make animations available as an alternative for students of varied interests and learning styles. Just as the previous paper on learning styles (MI and Teaching Strategies) noted, it is important to try to address as many different types of students as possible. Thus, an animation provides an excellent resource.

With this in mind, the results of how it helps all of the people is less relevant. If it helps some students, it is a valuable tool (IMHO). (Although I am glad to see that it did help many of the students.)

So, how can this be used to demonstrate other things. Although the article fringed on the idea of data structures, it did not mention them expicitly. Visualizing data structures is another valuable use of animation (go CS16!). I also believe that it is valuable to visualize interactions to teach patterns (factory, visitor, state) and often CS15 uses a visual tool (or the program) to visually show how this works so that people can understand it for later use. In addition, theoretical concepts could use visualization/animation. One could interactively visualize truth tables and turing machines.

That reminds me. Although this paper specifically addressed "animations," I think that it is important to also consider interactive visualization and animations, a more modern implementation of the same idea that manages to attract more kinestetic students.

And so, yeah, I agree with you too.

Great - that is a good point about NOT ALL STUDENTS LEARN THE SAME WAY. As instructors, do we need to look at how we can tailor to what is best for most students or do we have a responsibility to respond to individual needs on all subjects?

just food for thought (mmmm food)