Computing is fun! Let's help kids from all backgrounds discover that!

Why is it that the population of computer science students has many more men than women, more whites than other races and more kids from middle class families than from other socioeconomic backgrounds? And what can we do about it?

We want to admit the best, wherever they come from, regardless of who they are and what stars they were born under. And to do that, we must debunk the myth that computing at Cambridge (or indeed computing in general) is not for them.

As a lifelong educator (university professor by day, Japanese martial arts instructor in the evenings) my belief is that great teachers don't just teach: they INSPIRE. Because what makes students excel is not transferring knowledge but drawing out the students' enthusiasm for the subject.

I was delighted to be invited to lead this seminar for schoolteachers as part of the "Subject Passion as a Teaching Tool" series jointly run by the Trinity College Cambridge outreach team and by World Class Schools Quality Mark. Please check their websites at the URLs below.

The role of schoolteachers is incredibly important. It is only thanks to them and their dedication to their pupils that we'll be able to admit to University a more diverse generation of computer science students. This video is for them, and so are the additional teaching resources at the URLs below.

World Class Schools' "subject passion as a teaching tool":
https://www.worldclass-schools.org/su...

Trinity College outreach:
https://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/access/acc...

Trinity's youtube channel:
   / @trinitycollegecambridge1546  


FOR THE SCHOOLTEACHERS who wish to make use of this material in their classroom:

The topic is priority queues, and the ingenious and entertaining ways we can implement them efficiently. The core of the content is the binary heap. I recommend you encourage your students to code it up, firstly because it's very satisfying to see it work having built it yourself, and secondly because there is no better way to test one's understanding.

You will have to cope with pupils of vastly different abilities in the classroom and, while you should ensure your presentation is clear for those who have never been exposed to this material before, it is crucial that you also retain the interest and excitement of those for whom it may be easy, or who may have already done it by themselves before. You may challenge these more advanced students with additional material such as binomial heaps or even the rather more elaborate Fibonacci heaps.

Feel free to make use of the following videos from my Algorithms lecture course here at Cambridge.

Binary heap (and Heapsort): https://www.youtu.be/V8A-yIewOgQ
How to prove that we can build a binary heap in linear time (for the mathematically inclined): https://www.youtu.be/y9lF-UJwUVU
Binomial heap (and priority queues in general):    • Priority Queues and Binomial Heaps (A...  

The textbook I use for this course is Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein's "Introduction to Algorithms", MIT Press. You may also access my course handout at no charge:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/202...


Bego Soler has kindly prepared an outstanding slide deck you may reuse in your classroom:
https://www.worldclass-schools.org/wp...

All this, and similar resources for other topics (with seminars led by Trinity Fellows from other subjects) is at https://www.worldclass-schools.org/su...