LEARNING DATA STRUCTURES IN THE GENERATIVE AI ERA

Generative AI has created some significant changes for teaching computer science courses and has rendered many traditional textbooks for undergraduate computer science instruction obsolete. The author ran into this challenge when teaching data structure at a local college. This book is a result of student interaction and lessons learnt from that. This book stakes several new approaches for teaching data structures - it emphasizes the conceptual abstractions underlying data structures as opposed to code that generative AI can create easily, it emphasizes problem solving that forces the student to take creative analysis as opposed to simple problems whose solution is readily available from generative AI tools, and it encourages the student to use generative AI tools at various steps in the book, encouraging them to analyze the correctness of that response. This should provide a new approach for learning and teaching data structures that accommodates the disruption caused by generative AI.