The GDSV is a teaching aid for the instructor as well as a
student aid for debugging labs.
We as teachers design “Data Structure Labs,”
so that our students can practice common operations on data
structures.
For example, in a BinarySearchTree.java lab, you might
have your students implement methods such as insert(),
delete(), find(), numNodes(), numLeaves(), height(), width(),
etc. We’d like to provide a way to debug code that
avoids using cumbersome tracing techniques, such as System.out.println().
Now you can take your existing labs and use the GDSV
to see (literally) what is going on with your code.
The neat thing is that you do not need to change the
labs you’ve been assigning for years. You simply
have the students implement an interface and write a single
method that returns the array representation of the data
structure specified.
Not only does this program display a visual, but it also
provides a transition into lectures about array representations
of data structures.
