For my Undergraduate dissertation I worked with one of the university's lecturers to produce an animation tool for him to use in his teaching. He taught the concepts of algorithm design and analysis to second year students, and wanted me to produce dynamic animations to explain the concepts of String Searching.

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The tool allowed a lecturer to implement any algorithm of their choosing in Java, and then provided additional animation commands that could be used to augment their code. The animation toolset used the actual data being used by the algorithm to produce a set of animation steps. Once the algorithm was completed, the animation could then be played.

Because of the toolkit, the lecturer/students who used the tool were able to enter their own pattern and search string data, meaning that it was possible to view each of the algorithms with a range of different data, to show their performance in different circumstances.