1. A CASE STUDY INTRODUCING DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING IN CS2
James Daehn and Jamil Saquer
Computer Science Department
Missouri State University
Springfield, MO

2. Outline Motivation and Introduction Our Approach Study Description
Study Results
Questions

3. Motivation and Introduction
New major option software development
Algorithms course
2013 ACM/IEEE curriculum guidelines list DP under Core-Tier 1 topics
Introducing Dynamic Programming (DP) to students in SD major option

4. Our Approach Cannot spend more than a week
Some students will take algorithms course
Cover a simplified version of DP in CS2
interesting problems
with easy DP solution

5. Study Description Two 50-minutes lectures overlapping sub-problems
optimal substructure
top-down and bottom-up approaches

6. Problems Used Fibonacci sequence Jump-it game
Number of possible ways to climb stairs
Robot in a grid

7. Lab 1
Provide top-down and bottom-up DP implementations to find the nth Fibonacci number

8. Lab 2 Given a liability/cost matrix
Possible moves: one cell right, down or diagonally
Goal: starting at the top-left cell, we want to reach any cell (m, n) with the minimum liability

9. Lab 2 Given a liability/cost matrix
Possible moves: one cell right, down or diagonally
Goal: starting at the top-left cell, we want to reach any cell (m, n) with the minimum liability

10. Homework Assignment
Given a table with a certain number of golden coins in each cell
Start at top-left cell and want to reach bottom-right cell
Possible moves: one cell right or down
What is the maximum number of golden coins that can be collected? 5 3 9 7 2 1

11. Quiz
Short multiple-choice T/F quiz was given at start of second lab

12. Study Results Dynamic Programming Experiment Results Lab 1 Lab 2 HW
Lab 1
Lab 2 HW
Quiz
Highest grade
100%
Lowest grade 0%
Lowest removing 0s
63%
95%
80%
25%
Median
97%
Mean
87%
83%
77%
76%
Standard Deviation
0.31
0.35
0.40
Adjusted Average
98%
Dynamic Programming Experiment Results

13. Study Results Students understood the material
Students found the material exciting
run time improvements with DP
relative ease in converting an inefficient naïve recursive solution to an efficient DP based solution

14. Questions