Using Counter-Examples in the Data Structures Course

摘要

In many computer science courses, students face a sequence of activities that is quite monotonous in style: most assignments and labs ask the student to write a program that does something, to follow a procedure, or else to prove something. We advocate varying the pattern by including different types of activity which bring students to reflect on their ideas and especially to confront directly common misconceptions. We use the traditional "data structures" subject as the domain in which to present this approach to teaching. We give detailed accounts of several activities that include debugging wrong code and explaining the misconception in an argument.