Students Struggle with Concepts in Dijkstra's Algorithm

Artturi Tilanterä, Juha Sorva, Otto Seppälä, Ari Korhonen

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference article in proceedingsScientificpeer-review

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Abstract

Teachers who are aware of potential student misconceptions teach better than teachers who do not. In this article, we focus on misconceptions in the context of teaching and learning graph algorithms: we seek to discover student misconceptions about Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm and related concepts. We observed and interviewed fourteen students who worked on a visual simulation task involving the algorithm; we qualitatively analyzed these data to explore the students' mistakes and their underlying reasons. We find, among other things, that students conflate concepts such as spanning tree, fringe, and priority queue and that students may neglect the greedy and dynamic-programming aspects of the algorithm; we also identify usability issues in the visualization tool we employed. These findings suggest that teachers and tool designers need to take great care to help students tease apart the key concepts in graph algorithms.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICER '24: Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 1
PublisherACM
Pages154-165
Number of pages12
ISBN (Print)979-8-4007-0475-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2024
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: 12 Aug 202415 Aug 2024
Conference number: 20
https://icer2024.acm.org/

Conference

ConferenceACM Conference on International Computing Education Research
Abbreviated titleICER
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period12/08/202415/08/2024
Internet address

Keywords

  • algorithm visualization
  • algorithms
  • data structures
  • Dijkstra's algorithm
  • misconceptions

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