Algoaid – A Learning Tool for Students

PROJECT | 2022

Algoaid is a collection of useful tools for students taking an introductory course in algorithms and data structures.

When I was diving into the world of algorithms and data structures at university I supplemented the theoretical parts of the course with a lot of programming, experimenting with all the exciting new concepts I encountered. When closing in on the exam I started writing tools for my self that could help me for example double-check my answers or even solve some problems completely.

As I found these tools very useful, I believe that other students in the same situation would appreciate them as well, not just as a help for their exam but perhaps also as another way of interacting with the curriculum during the course. Hence I took some time to adapt all my code to an easy to use and well-documented Python package that is now available for everyone on PyPi (The Python Package Index) and that can be downloaded by running the simple command: pip install algoaid.

As an example, algoaid can analyze the time complexity of simple functions that depends on a single parameter. For instance it could be the function:

def f(n):
    j = 1
    while j * j < n:
        j += 1

By running analyse(f) we obtain the following result, which is indeed correct.

Writing my first package to be published on PyPi was a great learning experience. Exploring how a Python package should be structured and writing the code as clean and user-friendly as possible helped my develop my Python skills significantly.

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