In this way, the students could watch the program explore one path, reach a dead end, turn around, and try another route. Finally, I used Deluxe Paint to create a few motivating title screens, made a CLI script to execute everything in order, and dumped it all to videotape. This turned out to be the most popular video of the semester. The toughest subject in the course is definitely dynamic memory allocation and pointer-based data structures. This is the process of asking the operating system for chunks of memory, and then chaining these chunks into structures that can grow and shrink.
Instructors typically have to draw many pictures on the blackboard, erasing and redrawing as needed.
Through video, I have found a better method. This is a model of what happens inside the computer. The above picture does not display well on monochrome or 4-bit greyscale displays. Try to view it in color if possible. The students watch as the new memory chunk is filled with proper data values, and then inserted into the linked list.