Boxi Learn › Computing › Stage 3 · Structure and Evidence
The sorting race
CS-1 Break a big job into small stepsX-2 Evidence outweighs opinion
What many people think
Any method that gets the right answer is equally good.
The idea
Different step-by-step methods give the same sorted list but need very different numbers of comparisons.
Explain it
A friend says “bubble sort works, so it’s as good as any other.” Use the numbers for 1,000 items to explain why a programmer would still pick merge sort, and say when insertion sort is the smart choice.
Try at home
Shuffle 8 playing cards face down. Sort them twice: once by comparing neighbours (bubble sort), once by sorting each half and then merging the two piles. Count the comparisons each time, with someone keeping a tally.