In the line of fire

I teach data structures to CS students. Its a pretty challenging subject to teach as there are a lot of "complexities" involved and needs hours of preparation before a class. Last week, I entered the class confidently with the intention of teaching AVL trees. i had the concepts right but when i was trying to illustrate with examples the tree wouldn't just co-operate. either they are branching out at the wrong place or suddenly end up with a leaf or the root just went upside down.

The whole class cracked this mysterious tree and finally the tree bore fruit!..

so giving appropriate examples when it comes to Data structures is really important. It also helps if you take one simple example and work out all concepts based on that example. This helps students to relate to concepts much better. Take a simple tree and explain all the variations of a tree using one single example so that they remember the concepts for life.

I also observed that students could be perceiving completely different from what you are explaining. Once, just for fun, i asked all students to draw a "table". Some had drawn a dining table, some had drawn a rowXcolumn table and few even had written down numeric tables. So if a simple word "table " could have some many perceptions, imagine how complex it could be to make them understand complicated CS concepts.

Repeating the concepts more than once in a session could help them digest the concepts and put them into further use!