Abstract

This paper deals with the difficulty of learning linked lists in such a way that the person being taught feels that they fully understand the finer points of such a data structure.

According to the constructivist approach to education, people learn best when they can get right in there and experiment with the material to be learned because it allows the student to take what they already know, combine it with what they learn from the program, and create a more powerful and complete understanding of this data structure.  These principles were applied in an interactive environment that allows users to do just that: experiment, make mistakes, and in the process, come to a firm understanding of how linked lists actually work.

While there are other programs that have touched upon the concepts of linked lists, this constructivist based project would ultimately place more of the control and the power to manipulate and investigate in the hands of the user, with the belief that this would prove to be a more useful tool for those wishing to learn all about linked lists.

As well as basing the design of Edu-List on principles from the education discipline, the design process was also guided by fundamental principles from Human-Computer Interaction such as User-centered design, as well as low-fidelity prototyping techniques to bolster the soundness of the concepts before the actual computer implementation of the Edu-List program.