Dr. Venkatesh Choppella made presentations and gave an invited talk virtually at the 13th annual COMPUTE conference at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology Nagpur, Maharashtra from 9 – 12 December. Since 2018, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)-India had decided to focus the theme of COMPUTE towards improving the quality of computing education in the country and this was the third year of this thematic symposium. Dr. Chopella
- gave an invited talk on 11 December on Virtual labs: insights, initiatives and building a community.
- made a presentation on on 12 December on Algodynamics: next steps to building a community.
- made a presentation on Algodynamics: Teaching Algorithms with Interactive Transition Systems at PRE- ACM COMPUTE 2020 Workshop. The other resource persons were Prof. K Viswanath; Mrityunjay Kumar, PhD Student and Ojas Mohril, VLEAD Virtual Labs.
The workshop was meant for computer science teachers. It introduced the main ideas of Algodynamics through a series of examples drawn from data structures (lists, trees and graphs). The workshop introduced a hands-on approach to teaching algorithms that develops students’ abilities beyond simply tracing algorithms to actually designing them. The workshop allowed students to assemble an algorithm from basic building blocks and helped them understand why the algorithm is designed the way it is. The emphasis was not so much on programming or analysis of the algorithms, but incrementally gaining a good understanding of the inner workings of the algorithms and their design.
The workshop was interactive. Participants worked with a series of transition systems and `hand-executed’ them. It included small assignments, discussions and questions and answers during the presentations. The major examples covered in the workshop (iteration, recursion and graph traversal) were accompanied by online experiments.
Motivation of the workshop as explained by Dr. Venkatesh Choppella and his team:
Mastering algorithms continues to be a challenge for many students of computer science. The automated nature of algorithms limits the student to tracing the algorithm or seeing its animated execution. This interaction is passive. Active interaction with the algorithm would allow the student to `drive’ the algorithm towards solving a problem. Of course, at this point, we no longer have an algorithm, but an interactive system that, however, still retains the core elements of the algorithm’s machinery.
We propose Algodynamics, an approach to teaching algorithms as interactive transition systems. In the pedagogy of the Algodynamics approach, an algorithm is incrementally designed via a series of interactive systems. The interactions isolate the essential `moving parts’ of the algorithm and operations that actually cause the parts to move, allowing the student to `drive’ the interactive system and refine it till she arrives at an algorithm, a transition system that is completely automated. More details on Algodynamics website (https://algodynamics.gitlab.io).
More details at: http://www.acm-compute.in/2020/