Visualization as a key element in learning

Experience with teaching undergraduate and postgraduate computer science (CS) subjects has shown that students benefit substantially from being able to visualize fundamental topics. Examples are presented from five different CS areas, namely: (i) communications, (ii) parallel computing, (iii) artificial neural networks, (iv) genetic algorithms and (v) data mining. The majority of these examples stemmed from student projects, rather than commercial software products. Accordingly, students benefit twofold from the visually-oriented subject presentations, firstly in facilitating the learning of basic concepts, and secondly in the development of educational software packages as part of their project work.