Educational Fusion Implementing a Production Quality User Interface With JFC

Educational Fusion is a online algorithmic teaching program implemented in Java. In has been in the process of development for the last few years. When the system was initially started the only available UI production classes were those provided in Java’s Abstract Windowing Toolkit. As the system has evolved, multiple developers have worked on different portions of the interface, each with their own style and conventions. Recently, Sun released the Java Foundation Classes which include a rich set of UI development tools called Swing. At the same time, Fusion has matured to a state where it should have a production quality user interface. 1. Overview of the System Educational Fusion is a system for developing and utilizing advanced interactive educational algorithmic visualizations on the World Wide Web. Educational Fusion allows educators to create interactive visualizations which require students to use problem-solving skills to implement solutions. The students can then immediately visualize their algorithm's output, and compare it to that of a hidden reference algorithm. This is an improvement over other educational systems which are limited to semi-interactive visualizations and simple question-and-answer forms. There are four main components to the Fusion system: the concept graph, the editor, the visualization panels, and the collaboration tools.