Practising and Reinforcing Skills Using Puzzles

At faculties preparing students in the area of computer science subjects dealing with graph theory and algorithms belong to essential parts. Students studying this field of study are also expected to have good English language skills. Engagement of students in the learning process and carefully prepared study materials seem to be crucial elements of a successful teaching/learning process. If students deal with a task in an interesting and enjoyable way, they can recall the explained subject matter much more easily and, even more, their engagement is supported and keeps progressing. To get students engaged in the subjects dealing with graph theory and algorithms a particular problem with a real life example or a puzzle is introduced as a prototype of the explained concept or algorithm and a suitable graph-representation of a problem is discussed. Practising and reinforcing language skills play a very important role in foreign language education. With regard to the fact that our students of computer science specialization study both graph theory and algorithms together with English language, we innovated study materials testing their skills in both subjects combining graph theory tasks with English language tasks. Some examples using puzzles will be introduced in the paper. The aim of the paper is to introduce our approach to other pedagogues as a good inspiration for their teaching.