Using Animations to Support Teaching of General Computing Concepts

The use of animations to support the teaching of computing concepts has been supported for many years. Surprisingly there is little supporting quantitative evidence for the use of these animations. This may be due, in part, to a potential lack of focus on underlying pedagogical issues when creating animations and support systems. This paper considers these pedagogical issues and how they can be addressed using a general purpose, commercially available, animations package. This approach has the benefits of lower set-up costs, applicable to a wide range of topics, and potentially higher quality presentations when compared to many custom built animation packages. However, achieving wide usage of a third party animations package requires additional staff support in creating animations, and students must be motivated to utilise these animations. Above all, positive results must be achieved. This paper will present details of staff support, approaches to improve student motivation, and how pedagogical issues are addressed to achieve positive results. Multiple student cohorts have been surveyed and results will be presented demonstrating that positive learning outcomes can be achieved