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Another important part of the course are the assignments. They are composed
of a brief presentation, of a software implementation, and of a short software
demonstration at the end of the semester. Each student or student group (con-
sisting of maximal two students) chooses a specific research paper from a list
given on the course web page. I take care that the papers' topics and the pre-
sented approaches are not too complex. The final aim of the assignment is that
the
main idea
of a paper should be implemented in any programming language.
It is not needed that all features or interaction possibilities are implemented. But
a GUI is mandatory in order to give me and the other students the chance to
load another input file etc. Data sets depend on the paper topic, e.g., if the paper
presents a new treemap layout then the students can choose their own input,
such as the hierarchical file system on their own personal computer. All these
topics should be discussed in the first presentation in the middle of the course.
In a first step, each student or group prepares a presentation (10 minutes plus
3-5 minutes of discussion) about the chosen paper followed by a working plan.
In this way, I can steer the processes, give hints, and prevent nasty surprises. At
the end of the course, all implementations are presented and discussed in class.
I have found that this division into two presentations and demos respectively
helps students to think about important concepts. Furthermore, they have al-
ready learned the most important theoretical concepts during the course before
they start to program. My overall impression of this practical project is very
positive. At the beginning, the students often had doubts because it appears
time-consuming and complex, but they had a lot of fun in the progress of the
semester. The results were mostly really great; for me it is important that they
learn to see the diculties and to carefully reflect about the paper, not so much
the result itself. Often, however, the resulting programs were amazingly good.
My pedagogical concept, especially for the assignments, clearly follows moder-
ate constructivistic learning approaches, as described in the following written by
Jason Dykes or in some of my papers on learning concepts in context of using
Software Visualization techniques [33, 32, 59].
The course evaluation by my students led to very good results for this course.
They liked the way I structured the course, the motivating examples and videos,
and they had the subjective feeling that they have learned a lot of interesting
things. At large, it was not dicult to motivate students for InfoVis. It is a very
interesting field also suitable for the solution of practical problems. Therefore,
it was sometimes not so easy to explain why people cannot find more InfoVis in
standard software products. This leads to a problem that is discussed in paper
The Value of Information Visualization
[17] of this topic.
I would like to discuss one further issue that is important to me: Finding a
good balance between giving a good overview of the field as compared to explain-
ing the details of specific visualization techniques is pretty dicult, especially in
the frame of 15 course lectures. Some students liked to get more overview knowl-
edge of InfoVis, but they also disliked that some topics were only briefly covered.
For instance, I used 1-2 lectures for the visualization of graphs. It is enough time
to explain the most important things, but not enough time to explain the dif-
ferent graph drawing techniques in detail. Thus, I abstracted in many cases,
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