merlin-about
About
Abstract
Merlin is designed to empower instructors in creating visual aids like sketches, diagrams, and step-by-step animations to help learners grasp abstract programming concepts and develop accurate mental models. Traditionally, producing such visualizations, especially detailed animations, can be a time-intensive process.
Merlin addresses this challenge by introducing a declarative language specifically for algorithm animations and a streamlined customized code editor to simplify their creation. The design of Merlin is informed by an analysis of 400 examples from an online coding platform, examining their structure, common elements, and creation processes.
Key Components
- Merlin: A powerful declarative language for algorithm animation.
- Merlin-Lite: A simplified version enabling concise and minimal code to define animations.
- Merlin-Editor: An intuitive tool that reduces the burden of fine-grained editing through direct manipulation.
The expressiveness of Merlin was demonstrated across a range of examples, and qualitative feedback from instructors highlights its usability and potential to transform the way educational visualizations are created.
Examples from Leetcode
We look through more than 2300 problems from popular coding website Leetcode and colloect 400 examples to explore the patterns hidden behind DSA visualization. The collected examples can be found on this website.
Demo
Here is 5 minutes video to help fast understand Merlin project :)
User Study
We conduct a user research consists of three parts: a tutorial session (15 minutes), a task session (45 minutes), and an interview session (30 minutes). Task sessions involves four programming animation tasks sourced from online problem-solving platforms. These tasks are arranged in increasing order of difficulty and animation complexity, ranging from modifying a provided single-page animation to creating a complete algorithm animation from scratch.
The background of participants in user study is summarized as the following table:
And this is the after-survey of our user study. Most participants show positive feedback towards Merlin. For more detailed infomation, please refer to our related work.
Related Work
Thesis
Merlin: A Markup Language for Algorithm Animations (2024)
Author: Shu Wang
Supervisor: April Wang