[andrewparker]

Implementing the Trie (on paper, in C) was about 50% of my final exam on my intro to CS undergrad class at Stanford. We had never seen Tries befor that point, but we had done a variety of trees, so we had the necessary prior experience. It was a fun exam and a very memorable experience.

[supo]

You went to Stanford and have never seen a Trie in highschool? There are a few highschools in Bratislava, Slovakia that teach basic data structures in their Intro to programming courses.

[Pxtl]

North American high-school programming classes were not known for quality. Programming was not generally a high priority item for the school boards so teachers were often completely left on their own for curriculum, and often were amateur programmers at best (if programmers at all).

The end result is that university CS programs are run with the assumption that highschool students had zero prior experience with programming.

There's a reason that so many software geeks are hardcore libertarians and Bill Gates was fighting to reform teaching into a meritocracy - the educational system basically ignored their core skill-set and so the students were often self-taught. Obviously schools are playing catch-up now, but you can't change the past experiences of two generations of programmers.

[rch]

The computer science AP classes at my high school were taught by the typing teacher, after she took a summer course. The instruction consisted entirely of the slides from that course, followed by time to work independently on pretty much whatever, in Pascal.

[elliottcarlson]

People went to school at different times. When I was in high school there was no intro to programming courses - there were no computers in the school, besides some Mac Classics that were on some teachers desks. Since HN has a wide range of age groups, just because you had something available to you growing up, doesn't mean others did.

Oh how times have changed.

[tehwalrus]

My various schools all had computers everywhere - I didn't learn programming until the 3rd year of my (physics) degree.

In secondary school ("high school"), The only computer subject they taught was IT, and people weren't allowed to take it unless they had a special reason not to take a foreign language. It was rumored to be ridiculously easy.

The UK is supposed to be bringing in a programming GCSE - I'll believe it when I see it.

[marssaxman]

since when is a trie a "basic" data structure!?

[RomanA]

I had to do the same (on paper, in C) for my final exam in CS1 at my Uni. Our professor had prepped us on how to implement Trie (insertion, searches, memory complexity), though.