Lecturers of Electrical Engineering courses, especially when talking about system theory, communication, control or coding theory, are challenged by the need to visualize highly complex algorithms, formal procedures and systems. In the past, blackboard drawings and the use of overhead projectors (often using tricky constructions of layered transparencies to simulate the effect of primitive animation) served as `graphical interface' to the students. Today, with the breakthrough of widespread multimedia technology, there is for the first time in history the chance not only to give smoothly animated, live demonstrations of dynamic, time-dependent systems, but also to enable the students to explore this complex stuff using their computers at home, whenever they want and how often they need.
In this paper, a Java-based toolkit for the (easy) construction of animated system simulations is presented. The toolkit has been developed especially for on-line training material accompanying lectures on system theory and communication systems, but might--due to its abstract foundation and its flexibility--find applications in many other subject areas where some sort of `systems' and `block diagrams' are familiar.
The key requirements for the development of the labAlive toolkit were to