AN INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION TOOL FOR LEARNING SORTING ALGORITHMS

Information Technology (IT) is a driving factor in the process of globalization. Improvements of computer hardware, software and telecommunications have caused widespread improvements in access to information and economic potential. In the broadest sense, the term IT is often used to refer to all of computing. In academia, it refers to undergraduate degree programs that prepare students to meet the computer technology needs of business, government, healthcare, schools, and other kinds of organizations. In parallel to the increase of the practice of technologies in IT, the usage of data in the automated processes getting increases. Due to the storage of large scale of data inside the computer, there should be a proper mechanism to easily access them by sorting. There are many sorting algorithms available such as insertion sort, bubble sort, merge sort and quick sort. These algorithms are implemented and bear different complexity levels which makes harder to understand by IT academic students and difficult to teach them with their different understanding capabilities. In this research, an automated visualization tool is implemented as an auxiliary instrument to teach and learn how insertion sort, bubble sort, merge sort and selection sort behave with a data set available inside a computer. The tool is implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 C# language and uses graphical animation in illustrating the steps in each stage of these algorithms.