BY

Syed Mohiuddin, Salman A Moiz,

K.Manmohan Rao,  Eshwar Tenneti

&

THE STAFF OF CSE/MCA/IT

engineering COLLEGES OF

THE GOEDEL TURING SOCIETY

GULMOHAR GARDENS, SAI SHAKTI NAGAR

MALLAPUR,HYDERABAD

INDIA

OCTOBER, 2007

The reality today in India is that the mature Western software industry is in need of IT labor on a mass scale especially in the area of software maintenance, and the requirement may be 5 million software engineers in a few years time. These jobs are independent of the economic level a person starts with, the social strata from where he/she springs from and the family, regional, geographical background of the person. It is found that the minimal technical requirements for a person to qualify for entry level for most of these jobs will be---Computer Concepts, Data Structures and Algorithms, one or more of C, C++ and Java languages. Our experiments are in the introduction and instruction in the concepts of Data Structures and Algorithms, and are to serve as a supplement to a formal training program in software skills. The target audience is initially teachers in K-12 in schools where the instruction is in the native languages. Thus we cannot hope to use the English text books and cannot hope that the texts will be available in native languages in a hurry. Also the economic level of the school may not allow computers to be easily purchased for training purposes, or the energy charges to be spent on a laptop computer and projection system. The amount of paper or can be consumed in the tutorial also is to be minimal. The training has to be on minimal reusable resources. The model we choose is based upon the philosophy of Prof E W Dijkstra that Computer Science is essentially independent of the Electronic Digital Computer and its associated software. (In fact he was known for never owing a computer and rarely using one). This is associated with the concept that computation can be considered essentially to be playing with pebbles(Prof. Marvin Minsky. Another model that we choose is the exposition of Data Structures and Algorithms due to Profs D E Knuth and Prof J E Hopcroft. We tie up the concepts together with the directive of Prof C A R Hoare, when he visited India in the seventies that the concepts of Computer Science are simple and amenable to common sense explanations and they have been made unnecessarily complex. On this philosophy we have come up over the years with common sense explanations for many of the standard data structures and algorithms that are typically used for an initial or intermediate level course. In our hardware we choose as nodes reusable square pieces of plastic, wood, ceramic tiles or coins with the data stored in the node being illustrated by a number. The array indices are shown by reusable circular pieces of material which are appropriately numbered. We use reusable plastic or cardboard arrows for the links and pointers. The material is easily available in any third world country the economic level of the region. It is found that we can use and reuse coins of different sizes based on the local economy and number the coins with pieces of paper. Thus there is a nominal initial cost of the material and costs. The workshop consists of a faculty member of a leading college, department of CSE/IT/MCA, representative postgraduate students, representative undergraduate students and teachers of schools. Some of the data structures and algorithms covered include:- Linear search Binary search Insertion sort Selection sort Heap sort Binary tree traversal AVL trees Red black trees Graph algorithms Branch and Bound algorithms It is planned to run these workshops mainly in schools where the medium of instruction is not English in the city of Hyderabad where the medium of instruction is Urdu.Interior regions of Andhra Pradesh where the medium of instruction is Telugu. Some sample schools in rural areas with English as the medium of instruction. Extend the study to all the major regional languages of India.Export the concept to Third World countries. The results of the workshop will be summarized and submitted to the data base of the Computer Science Teacher’s Association(CSTA) of ACM/USA.The workshops will be run as a social service and the funding for travel, transport etc. will be sought from industry, academics and social service organizations, but primarily funded by volunteers at their own expense. COMMENTS In traditional civilizations knowledge was transmitted orally, by word of mouth. Even today a vast amount of knowledge is transmitted by word of mouth, verbally. This has the advantage that very little investment or requirement exists for physical material. Thus the cost to communicate knowledge is essentially low. The traditional problem of computation has been how to transmit and communicate algorithms. Our method uses the verbal means with a minimum amount of investment of material.


THE PROOF OF THE PUDDING IS IN THE EATING .




see http://www.gateguru.org
or http://www.gateguru.org.in
or http://www.gateguru.com.in
or http://www.gateguru.net.in
or http://www.gateguru.in
or http://www.etenneti.org
or http://www.gateguru.mobi
or http://www.suchi.in