Hungarian rotation
The 2013 Informatics Europe “Best Practices in Education” award was devoted, this year, to initiatives for teaching informatics in schools [1]. It was given out last week at the European Computer Science Summit in Amsterdam [2]. Two teams shared it, one from Poland and the other from Romania. Both teams showed excellent projects, but the second was beyond anything I expected.
The project comes from the Hungarian-speaking Sapientia University in Transylvania and is devoted to teaching algorithms visually and “at the same time enhancing intercultural communication” in the region. It illustrates the classical sorting algorithms through folk dances. Quicksort is Hungarian, selection sort is gypsy, merge sort is “Transylvanian-saxon”. I think my favorite is Shell sort [3]. For more, see their YouTube channel [4].
Now if only they could act the loop invariants [5].
References
[1] 2013 Best Practices in Education award, see here.
[2] 2013 European Computer Science Summit, here.
[3] “Shell sort with Hungarian (Székely) folk dance”, see here.
[4] YouTube Algorythmics channel, here.
[5] Carlo Furia, Bertrand Meyer and Sergey Velder: Loop invariants: Analysis, Classification and Examples, in ACM Computing Surveys, Septembre 2014, to appear, available here.
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