Dennis Komm and I have been invited to give a workshop in the education track at this year’s PyCon SK in Bratislava, Slovakia. Unfortunately, our overall workload left little room to attend many of the other sessions (not speaking Slovakian was certainly a further impediment), but the little we saw was interesting and impressive enough. A British high school student, for example, demonstrated how he used BBC micro:bits to unfold his creativity and build robotic devices, making a strong case for why small computing devices can have a large impact on students.
We based our own workshop on our research on how to bring algorithms and Computational Thinking into programming education early on. While projects like Computer Science Unplugged focus on algorithmic education without a computer altogether, we strive to integrate it into (Python) programming classes. We thus seek out examples that are easy enough for the students to fully understand and implement, while at the same time showing how an improved algorithm for the same problem can lead to drastically (and observably!) better performance.
A well-known example is computing the power x^a with a being a natural number. This can easily be implemented with a for-loop with a iterations. However, if we observe that x^8 can be computed with only three multiplications by x^8 = ((x^2)^2)^2, we can come up with a scheme that runs in linear rather than exponential time for input a. The difference in running time is then quickly observable. More could be found in our 2018 ISSEP paper.
However, what made the PyCon in Bratislava such a special experience was the friendly atmosphere and extremely warm welcome we received. Moreover, the participants showed strong interest in the topic, leading to a very interactive workshop where we went much further than ever before, arriving at topics like computability and what it actually means for a programming language to be Turing complete. If the Slovakian teachers manage to carry their enthusiasm for advanced computer science also into their classrooms, they might as well end up providing one of the best educations in computer science. We, on our part, certainly look forward to visit Bratislava again, and are looking forward to future opportunities for collaborations and exchange of ideas and experience.
