Computer animation for teaching Computer Science initially was a set of computer animations describing the systems or routines that defined the language under development. Some examples:
CAMPER
SCFOR, FOCUS Film
GROATS
and others had such films.
Several papers described some basic computer science subsystems that were needed by animation software:
- A Fast Storage Allocator (1965)
- A Programmer's Description of L6 (1966)
- A List Processing System for Effectively Storing Computer Animated Pictures (1968)
Bob Hopgood taught Compiling Techniques at Brunel University and his IFIP paper Computer Animation used as a Tool in Teaching Computer Science (1974) describes some of the films generated for use in that course.
Syntactic Dominoes was another film used at Brunel.
Syntactic Dominoes
Ron Baecker's 1973 paper Towards Animating Computer Programs: A First Progress Report discusses the possibility of animating the execution of a computer program.