Divide-And-Conquer Tutor

Background#

While taking an Advanced Algorithms course, I realized students often struggle to solve divide-and-conquer solutions. In some cases, students may jump straight to coding before solving the problem. In that class, we used an educational technology which has scaffolds to assist in solving some problems, like dynamic programming. However, there wasn’t as much scaffolding for divide-and-conquer problems. This project addresses this gap by guiding learners through the pre-coding phase of divide-and-conquer problem-solving using AI-driven scaffolding.

Goals#

With this tutor, I wanted to focus on the specific components of divide-and-conquer:

Problem Decomposition: Breaking problems into smaller, solvable subproblems.
Base Case Identification: Recognizing termination conditions for recursion.
Recurrence Relation Formulation: Defining how subproblems combine into a solution.
Pseudocode Translation: Structuring logic into code-like steps.