Reaction for: Developing an Interactive Illustration by Adam

I thought that this article made had some really good ideas about using java as a tool for creating interactive multimedia, but it didn't really leave much of an impression beyond that. I agree that its easier to understand something that you can see and interact with. The hard part is the implementation; it's easy to make an interactive tool, but it's rather hard to make a really good interactive tool which really leaves the user with a fuller understanding of the information at hand.

Moving away from the big picture now, I don't think that the concepts in cs15 lend themselves to further examples than what is already used. Perhaps more concrete demonstrations of design patterns would be useful; I'd be interested to see if a really good intereactive applet could be made to describe one or all of the design patterns.


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Jon:

Well, I think there is a definite difference between a concept like light or color and design patterns and polymorphism. The former have very definite visual components inherent to them. They are visual phenomenon, so seeing the visual change is very educational when changing parameters in the interface. However, what sort of illustration will be used to demonstrate the factory pattern? The best I can think of is an animation for what the pattern does. For example, the factory pattern could churn out an object every time you press the Create button. The prototype pattern could make clones of one object. The delegation pattern could look like a switchboard, and forward messages off to other objects. I'm not sure how interactive those are, but the visual description may help some people.


Lucas:

I don't know if that would be a good use of someone's time; I didn't find the patterns that complicated, and got them the first time around (remember, this is coming from someone who likes using the cs16 vizualizer for conceptualization reasons). Also, by further abstracting the factory pattern to just churn out an object of some sort, I think that some students might possibly be further confused.


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