Using Animations to Teach String Matching Effectively

String matching is to find a substring in a string. The algorithms commonly used for finding a matching are the brute-force algorithm, Boyer-Moore algorithm, and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm. The brute-force algorithm is intuitive. The Boyer-Moore and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithms are more efficient than the brute-force string matching algorithm, but they are more difficult to understand than the brute-force algorithm. We have created the animations for helping instructors to teach and students to learn these algorithms. This paper presents these animations.