]> Removing and Resorting Application Cards Kate April 19, 2004 Application Cards

Instructors can find out how well students understand how to select an approach for implementing a solution to a scenario involving efficiently inserting and removing data as a batch process.

Read the following scenario and answer the question. Be certain to back up your decisions.

You are the manager of a collection of data that keeps track of the current undergraduate students in the department. The department head wants the data sorted in alphabetical order. Each night, you receive a list of new undergrad students that have been admitted, as well as a list of students who have the left department due to sudden, acute insanity. Since the department head is monitoring your computer usage, your code must be able to handle this batch insertion and deletion as efficiently as possible.

How would you implement a solution to this removing/resorting problem?

Student answers will vary greatly. The two conflicting issues of efficient removal and efficient resorting should be discussed.

Read through the applications and sort or mark them as "Good," "Acceptable," "Marginal," or "Wrong." Read through the piles again to make sure that you have not accidently misclassified a response. You might also want to sort the responses by the type of algorithms are used.

Choose three or four of the best examples from the "Good" pile. Emphasize understandability, but try to have a diversity of example domains. Also consider a few acceptable and marginal responses that highlight points you wish to discuss.

If you use an application in class as a bad or poor example, change the application just enough to disguise the example from the original authors.

Have students write applications individually and submit these to the instructor anonymously. The instructor reads the applications and the class discusses the merits of these applications. The instructor might want to describe what the code would look like for some of the applications. Each student writes an application and explains their application to the rest of the class. Break students into small groups (2-4 people) and have each group find two or more applications. Have each group explain their applications to the rest of the class. Develop ability to apply principles and generalizations already learned Learn concepts and theories in the subject Develop capacity to think for oneself Develop ability to think creatively Develop ability to draw reasonable inferences from observations Sorting Real World Scenarios Batch processing Memory Efficiency LOW MEDIUM MEDIUM MEDIUM Lecture Next Day Summary Class Discussion Small Group Discussions Homework Difficult to Enable Algorithms Data structures Design ADTs