DAVID MALAN: --less on the
lower level implementation
details of code, that we'll
look at a couple of examples.
So this more--
DOUG LLOYD: Go ahead.
DAVID MALAN: I was going to say,
more than a couple of examples.
This is actually one of the heaviest
visual lectures that we have,
with lots of demonstration.
DOUG LLOYD: Yeah, if you take a look
at the syllabus at a high level,
there's a lot of topics that we cover.
We spend almost an entire
lecture in week three
just talking about different algorithms.
We're going to going to solve the same
problem many different times, just
using a number of different algorithms.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, and I actually worry
that I throw too much of the kitchen
sink at this one, it's fun I think to
involve students as much as we can,
and the reality is, especially
now that this year's lectures are
fewer but longer, they
sort of naturally all fit
within the same units of lecture.
But I think for other teachers,
especially in high schools and colleges
elsewhere, like cherry picking
some of these topics is good.
And I think probably I should
be cherry picking as well,
and not using every example
every year, but it's
kind of hard to make
the trade off I think.
DOUG LLOYD: When we have demonstrations
of sorting numbers on stage
or sorting people on
stage, eventually we're
going to find out that bubble
sort, and insertion sort selection,
that they're all 0 of n squared
algorithms, they're all the same.
But the way they look
is really different,
and I don't think you
can appreciate that
without seeing a physical
representation of those--
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, I agree.
DOUG LLOYD: --differences.
DAVID MALAN: And this one
used to be very physical,
so our touchscreen implementation
is the more modern incarnation
of what used to be just a chalkboard
where I would use tape and paper,
and paper the board with like
eight pieces of paper behind which
I would draw with chalk some
numbers and have stood and search
for those numbers.
DOUG LLOYD: And if
memory serves, that might
be one of the most memorable moments
we've ever had in CS50 actually.
DAVID MALAN: Yes, [? Sean, ?] bless
his heart struggled so to find
the number he was searching for.
But it was good because it lends
themselves to these memorable moments,
right?
Like he and a lot of his
classmates will never
forget the time that he was trying
to inefficiently search for numbers
behind a door, especially
inefficiently in his case
as we'll eventually see here.
DOUG LLOYD: It make the
class a lot more fun.
It draws people in sometimes
when things don't go well.
It's kind of funny to have things
go off the rails a little bit
as long as you can hopefully get
it back where it's supposed to be.
I mean this is great, it gives us
an opportunity to talk about sorting
and how sorted lists--
you can search them eventually more
efficiently as we're going to see now.
I think it's good to
all these demonstrations
and get people involved and physically
seeing where these things are going.
DAVID MALAN: But there's
a trade, I mean we
know from mid and end of semester
evaluations and feedback forms
from students that there
are some students who really
don't like that we get mired in some
of these longer form demonstrations,
right.
For the student for whom binary
search, linear search, and all of this
comes very quickly, very
naturally, they don't
need to be a captive audience
member in a space like this.
But this is why I
think it's so much more
effective being able to engage with the
course's content online in the video,
especially now that we
have a table of contents
and you can very easily
jump to other sections.
If you get this and fun though
it may be you want to skip this,
it's just all the easier and you
don't even manually scrub and find
the next spot, you can just jump over,
leapfrog this whole section entirely.
And so that's what helped this
year, I was much more comfortable
with the kitchen sink in doing all
of these demonstrations knowing
that now everything is wonderfully
indexed thanks to Colton and Luke's
video player, and we can very quickly
jump around, or the student can,
to what topics they actually
do want to spend time on.
DOUG LLOYD: There's something else you
mentioned in that description earlier,
which is these feedback
forms that we actually
collect at the end of every assignment,
I think some people might not realize,
we actually do take these
things really seriously
and at the end of every
semester you, and I,
and other members of
the senior staff really
sit down and process all of this.
DAVID MALAN: A huge amount.
DOUG LLOYD: And this
year your particular
it became really noticeable
with our switch to Python,
and the way we deliver
lectures, but you know,
we're constantly trying to improve our
own delivery of content [INAUDIBLE]
as well.
DAVID MALAN: Yeah, this
year was a big change.
Certainly the lecture times and
frequencies was just the least of it,
so much curricularly has changed
and structurally about the class.
Certainly.
