[Year 12 SofDev] sorting criteria My thoughts

[Andrew Shortell]

Hi All
been thinking a lot about today’s PD at coburg

our table discussed the below - are we too harsh, too easy, or in the goldilocks zone?

in the criteria the students have to document and use a complex sort to obtain a 9 or 10

so the documentation can be the internal doc because very few companies produce a “Tech Ref Guide” they just put stuff on their website and let google etc find it

so what is a complex sort

perhaps start at the other end 
to get 1 or 2 they should be able to use the built in sort function (properly and put internal doc about it)

to get 3 or 4  maybe a bubble sort  (I taught it because it is so simple and not too hard to get them to understand it)

to get 5 or 6 maybe a selection sort - documented

to get 7 or 8 a quick sort

to get 9 or 10 they need to display deeper knowledge
	such as a quick sort is NOT efficient when the sublist size drops below about fifteen so at that point need to do selection (or insertion) sort

in visual studio the sort method uses quick-sort to a sublist of 16 then selection sort according to MSDN

So the sort method in VB is very complex — but using it is so simple
but I want to see that they can code …

I used Hungarian dances to teach sorting - even getting students on their feet and “dancing” around ( I cannot remember for sure who found them on youtube originally [was it Mystery Mark? ] but thanks)

The young people found that for most of them the actual getting up and moving around was a good idea
It is also a great way to teach linked lists - not a lot of dancing but my students realised how little movement there is in a linked list!

more thoughts as they surface

Andrew

Andrew Shortell
Educator
CRC Melton


shortell at get2me.net (This List)
@acsbear8 (twitter)






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