A graphics API for learning data structures and algorithms

Generation Z are the next generation of college students. These students have demanded new teaching practices. The use of visual resources for learning and the anxiety for immediate results are one of their demands. This paper discusses a strategy for teaching and learning data structures supported by the DSGraph library. This strategy has been used in Federal University of Juiz de Fora in order to adapt the teaching of abstract concepts such data structures and its algorithms for the new generation of students. The library aims, through visual representation, the elucidation of the concepts covered during the course of data structures, combined with active student participation in the construction and development of its solutions. An experimental study was carried out for two years with two groups of students. The first group was submitted to the proposed methodology and other group was submitted to the traditional methodology. The results show that the methodology proposed reaches satisfactory improvement of the approval rate and the students’ satisfaction.