Data Structures, undergraduate course (2012-2013)

In 2012 I taught as a TA in a computer engineering course on data structures, at Azrieli College of Engineering. During the first semester I gave one lesson a week, and during the second semester I gave three lessons a week. The lessons were on the same material, but for different groups of students. Teaching at the college was a very different experience from teaching at ELSC. The course was mainly for first year students, who were still becoming accustomed to academic studies. Many of the students showed minimal interest in the lesson, and I tried many times to nudge them to participate, ask questions, or answer my questions to them. Each lesson centered around a small number of data structures or algorithms, including heaps, stacks, queues, binary & AVL trees, hash tables, sets, maps, and several sort algorithms. In the presentation I tried to demonstrate the algorithms in a clear way. The slides were neat and simple. I would go step by step through how an algorithm would run on toy data. My goal was that even if the students didn’t remember all the details of the algorithm, they would still have a clear intuition of what the algorithm does, when it works, and in what situations it is efficient.