An innovative approach carried out in data structures and algorithms lab

The course on Data Structures and Algorithms is foundation for Computer Science Engineering. A different approach is adopted for postgraduate (PG) students in carrying out the data structure lab. The input to the PG program is also from non Computer Science disciplines, where a cluster of students have less programming experience. In addition, earlier the PG program did not have a laboratory course. This resulted in less exposure of programming which also partly affected their major project work. A laboratory course on Data Structures was introduced along with the corresponding theory. The practical sessions play an important role to understand and learn the course effectively. In the traditional approach, the lab exercises were on the elementary Data Structures with predefined problem statements. Students would either implement the existing algorithm or just one application would be implemented. This made the students to restrict their thinking to only specific applications of Data Structures with lower level of self learning. Hence we have come up with an innovative approach to conduct the Data Structures and Algorithms laboratory that could fill up the lacuna. Our paper describes the new approach for teaching the data structure course, which focuses on active learning, ability of learning data structure concepts, applying them to solve the real world problems, formulate the problem and implement the solution using programming skills. The lab exercises are designed based on Data structures topics such as stack, queues, lists, binary trees and few algorithm design techniques such as divide & conquer and dynamic programming. All the exercises are open-ended of level-3, where the problem, ways & means and answers are open. In other words neither the problem statement, algorithm or solutions are given, but only the concept is given to the students. This motivated them to think of applying the suitable data structures in different courses of their curriculum and also in other domains or fields. In this paper authors discuss their experience in design, implementation, assessment methods used for evaluating the students.