The LEAGUE Code Clinic offers short free classes for intermediate CS students and their teachers. One of our upcoming sessions will be of particular interest to CS educators, how to demonstrate and teach most of the major sorting and searching algorithms with playing cards and card games.
Teach Algorithms and Abstraction with Cards
The lesson will start with the simple game of War to demonstrate the definition of an algorithm and how to describe it. Then we will modify the algorithm step by step to teach selection sort, insertion sort, bubble sort and binary searching. By using letters and sticks, we'll discuss abstraction, and extend our algorithms to demonstrate parallelism and concurrency. The lessons are aimed at middle and high school students. If you attend, be sure to have a deck handy!
Please let your students know about the Code Clinic too, as we will be introducing a lot of other topics that will be of interest to students after their first course in text-based programming: how to start a new Java or Python project, getting started with Web development, pair programming with AI, an introduction to Python data analysis, and many other topics.
My organization, The LEAGUE of Amazing Programmers, is a San Diego non profit dedicated to CS education for middle and high school students, so we're eager to take requests for new Code Clinic topic, or to have one of our volunteer instructors bring the class into your school. Please contact me if you are interested in either new topics or brining a lesson to your class.
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Eric Busboom
Executive Director
The League of Amazing Programmers, San Diego, CA
m: 619 889 7571
w: jointheleague.org e:
eric.busboom@jointheleague.org------------------------------