Day 20: Making Sense of DSA and Looking to the Final Project

Concept Mapping DSA (30 minutes)

Exercise 1

With at least two other people (assuming you are in class), create a concept map for this semester thus far in DSA.

We’ll do a quick share out.

Charting Your Learning (20 minutes)

Exercise 2

Look back to your learning goals you had at the beginning of the semester (I emailed each person what they wrote on the survey). How have you been progressing with respect to these learning goals? Try to jot down a few notes with respect to each of your learning goals. Look back on your effective learning strategies (assignment 1). How have these been going? Take about 5-7 minutes to think individually, and then share with those around you.

Charting the Course for the Rest of the Semester (50 minutes)

Data Structures and Algorithms is obviously a vast topic. As we enter the last bit of the course, which has much more flexibility, you’ll need to figure out how you want to extend / deepen your knowledge. Perhaps you already know exactly what you want to do, but I suspect many folks would benefit from looking into some resources. Here are some jumping off points I’d like to share.

• (we didn’t cover the whole book, but you can choose what to fill in)CLRS Table of Contents
• (A firehose of potential topics) Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
• (Some topics that get covered at the grad level) MIT Advanced Algorithms Class
• (the research frontier in an incredibly prestigious conference) Proceedings of the 2023 Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA)
• (specific jumping off points for machine learning fairness) Fairness and Machine Learning
• (specific jumping off points for optimization) Boyd’s Book on Convex Optimization