Had Fun giving a talk on Algorithms!

Wow I had a blast today!

I went to my college CMRIT to give a talk on Algorithms to the 2nd year students there. The HOD, Mrs Padmaveni, greeted me and introduced me to the kids. The interested thing was, none of the students knew that there is a guest lecture thats about to happen. So they were not really prepared for it. I had gone with the intention of giving them a few puzzles and asking them to solve some TopCoder like problems that I had made. However the projector took a lot of time to get prepared and I could only throw on some puzzles to them.

We spoke about DFS, BFS, Rat in a Maze, how web crawlers work (the BFS application of the same) etc. They were quite excited to see the Sudoku code in action, but I felt it would be a bouncer for them. So we ended up discussing something simpler like Minesweeper . Not just discussing, I encouraged them to think the program out. I assisted with the coding part. Within 45 minutes, our Minesweeper backend was done. In 1 hours time, the game was fully playable (without a GUI though).

For many of the students it was an absolute bouncer! But I hope they did feel encouraged to take on programming . Some (say 20%) actually understood the whole thing. Which is good. Then there were about 20% who felt they can do better with bunking the class and they walked out.

Man it was an awesome experience. I realize that I absolutely love teaching. I would love to provide them everything that I couldn’t get when I was in their place.

All in all a great experience.