David Ginat
Abstract
Educators' approach towards their students' mistakes can have significant impact on the students. This paper presents a rather less considered approach of teaching by capitalizing on mistakes. In the course of teaching our students algorithm design, we noticed the phenomenon of students' "over-reliance" on intuition rather than rigor. In particular, we noticed a repeated erroneous trend of turning to intuitive, but inadequate greedy algorithmic solutions. We capitalized on the student errors for influencing their attitude and beliefs regarding intuition and rigor. The paper displays the student errors and our capitalization-on-errors approach, with colorful and novel algorithmic tasks.
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Index Terms
- The greedy trap and learning from mistakes
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The greedy trap and learning from mistakes
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