> Not only do they help the student with writing code, the introduce important parts of programming as well as Big-O notation.
Are sorting algos the best methods for helping students write code and learning about Big-O? I don't think so. Learning the fundamental data structures are a lot more useful for that purpose, I think. Of the standard crop, I think the binary search is a good algorithm to teach (though one must note its historical implementation problems in languages with fixed int sizes), and if you're going to do sorting then quicksort + insertion sort when N < 16 wouldn't be awful. At least mention the language's built-in sort so that open source projects like gnu flex don't inherit a DIY sorting function in the code (in their case, the evil bubble sort which should never be taught).
Instead of the cast of characters for sorting algos, I'd rather see something like this cast of maze generation algos: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit... I think they would accomplish your goals better, plus they have shininess built-in.
>…"Lets learn Unity3D" course in front of me, I would never ever attend that university.
But you would probably still be doing programming and CS elsewhere. You're already set. This post is about trying to attract people into programming at the HS or college level who otherwise wouldn't be. But from the other comments it seems like I might agree with you specifically on Unity3D; I haven't used it myself but it doesn't sound all that rad as a teaching tool. I fully support mixing PyGame into a Python course, though.
Are sorting algos the best methods for helping students write code and learning about Big-O? I don't think so. Learning the fundamental data structures are a lot more useful for that purpose, I think. Of the standard crop, I think the binary search is a good algorithm to teach (though one must note its historical implementation problems in languages with fixed int sizes), and if you're going to do sorting then quicksort + insertion sort when N < 16 wouldn't be awful. At least mention the language's built-in sort so that open source projects like gnu flex don't inherit a DIY sorting function in the code (in their case, the evil bubble sort which should never be taught).
Instead of the cast of characters for sorting algos, I'd rather see something like this cast of maze generation algos: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2011/2/7/maze-generation-algorit... I think they would accomplish your goals better, plus they have shininess built-in.
>…"Lets learn Unity3D" course in front of me, I would never ever attend that university.
But you would probably still be doing programming and CS elsewhere. You're already set. This post is about trying to attract people into programming at the HS or college level who otherwise wouldn't be. But from the other comments it seems like I might agree with you specifically on Unity3D; I haven't used it myself but it doesn't sound all that rad as a teaching tool. I fully support mixing PyGame into a Python course, though.