How difficult are CS 2110 and CS 2800 for students with little CS background?

leegao
Fri, 25 Dec 2009 19:36:50 +0000

Seems like the proper way to teach CS to be honest. There’s no way to actually master the craft of programming without practicing. And the biggest hurdle to overcome is to figure out where to start. The rest is nothing more than abstractions of pure mathematics.



Just as a measure, one of the programming assignments from Bailey has you implement a B-tree, a notoriously difficult data structure to properly implement



To be fair, a B-tree is relatively easy to implement by itself, as a simple boolean recursion method is already a functional B-tree (complete with backtracking capabilities to keep track of the nodes). However, a simple boolean recursion doesn’t balance itself. It’s much better to see the practical differences between these two types of structures rather than to just talk about it and hope that the students will finally understand. The concept behind a binary tree is trivial at its worst, the actual implementation of a proper one is not. That’s the difference between math and CS.