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How Not to Teach Recursion

parentheticallyspeaking.org · 2,297 words · saved by 1 readers

We all know how to teach recursion. We’ve done it for decades. We pick some honored, time-tested examples—Fibonacci numbers and factorial being leading candidates—and use them to teach the general idea. They’re so canonical they come directly from the gods: you can find these in books by people like Niklaus Wirth.

How Not to Teach Recursion How Not to Teach Recursion 🔗 1 Some Canonical Examples 1.1 Factorial 1.2 Fibonacci 1.3 Euclid's Algorithm 1.4 Fractals 1.5 Towers of Hanoi 2 Recursion versus Cyclicity 3 Is Recursion in the Problem? 4 How to Teach Recursion 4.1 Function Follows Form 4.2 One Datatype, Many Problems 4.3 When Recursion Becomes Difficult 4.4 Back to the Canonical Problems 4.5 Going Beyond Loops 4.6 That Was Pretty Dense We all know how to teach recursion. We've done it for decades. We pick some honored, time-tested examples— Fibonacci numbers and factorial being leading candidates

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