[APPLAUSE]
- So we don't ask people to
search for seven anymore.
- [INAUDIBLE] to do two different
demos that to do that do two different
things.
And the first one is these exam
blue books that, thankfully, as of
this year we don't use any more.
- A lot of classes still do, I think.
I don't understand these blue books.
- But why do we use our blue books?
- I think someone bought
a lot of them 20 years ago
and they're still using them.
- We're using the same
supply that we got in 1994.
- So the opportunity at hand for
this demonstration, in my mind,
is to invite a student up.
They are handed 26 blue books,
on top of which are 26 names.
Which in reality we simplify
as just A through Z.
And the goal was to have a
student struggle, so to speak,
with the sorting of a pseudo
random permutation of these books.
To see really how they do it.
This is not hard, so long as you
know your A's through your Z's.
Like, it's easy to do.
But it's interesting,
I think, to observe
the student do it and have him or her
or verbalize what it is they just did.
And see if we can glean
from that experience
some germ of an idea, something
algorithmic that we can then formalize.
- Right.
Because usually when you're
sorting you're just looking at it.
You're thinking about
-- you're not saying,
well I'm going to put the E after the --
- You're not even
thinking about it really.
- Yeah.
I'm saying, well, this is the E so
it's going to have to go after the D,
I'm going to put it in this pile
temporarily while I figure out
what to do with the rest of it.
In there, like you said,
there are these little germs
of things that we'll see when we
talk about the formalized algorithms
of selection sort,
insertions sort, bubble sort.
- I mean, especially in week zero.
When we do the very intuitive,
I think, divide and conquer,
looking for Mike Smith
in the phone book.
But then we take a step back and
try to formalize it with pseudo code
and put to paper or put to the screen
exactly what it is we were thinking.
And trying to teach
students how to express that
and, ultimately, how to leverage that.
The downside, I will say,
of a demo like this is you
never know what you're going to get
in the way of the actual students
experience.
Sometimes it goes well,
sometimes it doesn't go well.
In terms of the pedagogy of it.
Sometimes the student does
it so quickly or so well,
accidentally or algorithmically,
that there's not much to talk about.
And so the reality is it's actually nice
when a student struggles a little bit
or gets hung up for a
moment, has to think.
Because that's an opportunity to jump in
and say, all right, what's the decision
point here.
what's the fork in the road, the
decision you're trying to make?
And here we have, thanks to the
production team, an over the shoulder
camera angle so that we can actually
see the B is there about to be sorted.
- Especially with a demo like this,
where things are actually fairly small.
It's nice to be able to
project this on the screen
for people who are watching
live or watching after the fact
to see these steps side by side.
- And I do think these kinds of demos
hopefully make things very real, right?
At the end of the day, it's kind
of daunting for a lot of students
to be in a computer science class.
And yet, this is very
accessible. even if no one
knows what a Blue Book is anymore.
You at least know that
sorting, OK, this is something
I've probably had to do at some point.
Let me see if I can't clean this up
now and start of formalize and leverage
this.
- Right.
