Fall teaching season has started with one old course already ongoing. Devices and networks. My part is the networks, so currently I can focus on two new courses starting in October. Data structures and algorithms is an old course but I’ll take responsibility for it this year.
Another course, Platforms and ecosystems is a new course. Meaning I have hands full in creating material for the new course together with two other teachers. And at the same time, familiarising myself with the data structures course.
For the data structures course, I’ve worked earlier with the demo sorting app implemented using Swift. No time to add additional sorting methods there, but should build it with new Xcode, Swift and iOS 14 to see if there are any (breaking) changes.
What I did recently is that I implemented simple (and stupid) array and linked list classes, both in C++ and Swift, to demonstrate the effectiveness of creating and accessing arrays in comparison to linked lists. Will be using that when discussing why different data structures have different (preferred) usage situations. And that there may be conflicting requirements for the data structure in an app. Then you just have to make compromises.
Another important thing to show to the students is that you need to build the release version before comparing or measuring performance.