Ithaca College

Ali Erkan's paper "The Educational Insights and Opportunities Afforded by Prim's and Kruskal's MST Algorithms" won the best paper award of ITiCSE 2018, the 23rd Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. The award is sponsored by the ACM Europe Council.

Networks almost always have more connections than what's needed at a minimum for direct or indirect connectivity. Two methods taught in a Computer Science degree at a junior/senior level for the discovery of this minimum set of connections are considered foundational and have been in existence for decades. Erkan's paper is an outline of how (i) these methods can be taught in such a way that other significant topics can better be digested by students, and (ii) students can learn to negotiate mathematical and empirical results. In addition, while the operation of these methods take roughly the same amount of time, the paper shows that the quality of their results may differ based on typically overlooked factors of the underlying networks. This allows students to engage in a novel inquiry without compromising topic/concept content of the underlying curriculum.