Today I started an experiment I created an excercise for coursework in algorithms and data structures that is very unusuale and many people have been criticle if this was a good idea. The idea behind the exercise is that studens should read wikipedia articles to topics related to lectures and find mistakes or suggest things that could be improoved. Thereby I hope that people will do something that many people in science don’t do often enough: Read something critically and carefully and question the things that you have learnt. (more discussions after the exercise)
Read the following wikipedia articles:
- AVL Trees
- Red Black Trees
- Divide and Conquorer
- Backtracking
- Heap (data structure)
- Dynamic Programming
Find at least 5 mistakes or passages that could be improved. Write down what is wrong or what could be improved. Give a justification for your statements and write down your suggested new version of this very passage.
To get inspired you can find mistakes by looking at the discussion page of the articles or at the version history. You might also be able to look the same article in versions of other languages!
Here are some example types / things that could possibly be improoved:
- pure mistakes
- semantics of links
- semantics of pictures
- articles could explain easy concepts in difficult words
- missing cites
- missing links to original scientific work
- …
Further discussion
I am really excited how many students will try to do this exercise and how well it is accapted and what the quality of the answers will be…
I would also love to receive your feedback, thoughts and comments about this kind of exercise! Mabe you have some ideas that could be extended or you asked students to do similar coursework?