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Comment by anticnstrctv | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm alone, but I never felt the graph theory pedagogy I experienced was very confusing or boring (I did think this about plenty of CS topics!). There's lots of motivating examples to pull in, and better/clearer diagrams than this in may places. This just seems like a not very lucid description of theory that is very formalized and that many lectures and textbooks deal with.

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When I was 16 I changed sixth form[0] following a house move and I was accidentally put onto a maths course that was basically algorithms without computers. I think the name was something like Decision and Discrete.

This course started with Zeller's congruence as an example of an algorithm and then moved onto some graph theory and then onto Dijkstra's algorithm. I never got to see what the rest of the course contained, but it really looked like a good course. Sadly I was not able to persuade the person who was in charge to let me continue to take the course.

All the people on the course absolutely hated it from the start; thought I was mad to want to do it; would go on to fail it and as a result this was the last year the sixth form would run it.

[0] Sixth form is the 16-18 optional education in the UK.

"education in the UK"

In England and Wales, maybe in NI but definitely not here in Scotland, which has a completely different system.

>Sixth form is the 16-18 optional education in the UK.

It's only sort-of optional now - since 2015 you're required to remain in education or training until 18, although that includes vocational courses and apprenticeships.

You're talking about the D1 module, which was considered the easiest maths module at my school, because it doesn't really require much understanding, you just have to learn the material.

D-maths modules in the UK have changed a lot over the years, seems like they started out pretty legit and got diluted over time. Depends when they took it.

I took it 6 years ago. When were they introduced?

At least the early 90s, possibly earlier.

I hated that module. I found it boring because it was just memorising algorithms and applying them. The key aspect of studying algorithms, complexity and analysis of the algorithm itself, was missing.

besides data structures, graph theory and its related curricula were my favorite and overall most practical areas of the CS education I received

Nothing covered in this article is stuff I'd consider very complicated, but I took a class on graph theory and the kinds of algorithms and concepts covered in the second half of that course were much more complex, though the fact that I hadn't taken a modern algebra class probably hurt me with some of those things, not to mention the class was also about the relation to combinatorics which presents much more interesting, though more complicated, problems.

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