Experiments in Sorting

Vision

During 2019-20, senior Nate Herder built ​audio-visualizations​ for several sorting algorithms. This team project builds on Nate’s work. The team will work with Prof. Adams to devise and run experiments using 4 groups:

1. A control group that will just run traditional sorting programs, with no audio or visual enhancements.
2. A treatment group that will run sorting programs with audio enhancement.
3. A treatment group that will run sorting programs with visual enhancement.
4. A treatment group that will run sorting programs with audio and visualenhancements.

Following the experiment, the group-members will be assessed on their understanding of the sorting algorithms, to see if any significant differences exist between the groups. The experiment will be run both semesters, in the hopes that sufficient data will be collected to provide interesting results. The student team will help design the experiment, run it, create the assessment instrument, and evaluate the results.

Team

Joshua Wright

• Josh is a BCS student from the Chicago suburbs. He desires to use his degree to develop software to make the world a more efficient place. He was interested in this project to help make the classroom more efficient as well.

Bryce Allen

• Bryce is a BCS student from Chicago Illinois. He was attracted to computer science from a young age when he started to learn basic programming skills. He wanted to do this project because of his interest from prior courses in high performance computing.

Bryan Fowler

• Bryan is a Senior at Calvin University planning to graduate Spring 2021 with a BCS degree. He’s from rural Eastern Oregon and enjoys software development. He hopes to work out in the west after graduation somewhere in the CS field.

Presentation

Code

This is a link to our GitHub repository

TSGL: A thread-safe graphics library perfect for drawing graphics. This is what we use to display visual representations of the sorting algorithms.

TSAL: A thread safe audio library that uses audiolizations to assist in the understanding of concurrent and parallel processing.

Report

This is a link to our project proposal. In this document are our design norms and updated project schedule.

This is a link to our final report. This document contains our experiment outline, execution steps, results, and findings.

Additional Resources

Department of Computer Science website

December 1st Presentation