Data Structures & Algorithms: Thinking in Cost
Students do not fail DSA interviews because they cannot code. They fail because nobody taught them to reason about cost. This workshop makes that the spine of everything — from Big-O on day one to dynamic programming on day five, with a visualiser for every structure they meet in C.
Arrays · Trees · Graphs · DP
From O(n²) to O(n log n)
5
Days, ~4.5 hrs each
26
Hands-on sessions
100+
Practice problems
₹0
Tooling cost (GCC is free)
Not a tour of structures — a way of choosing between them
Most DSA teaching is a parade: here is a stack, here is a queue, memorise the operations. Students finish able to recite that insertion is O(1) and still unable to say which structure a problem needs. We invert it. Every session starts from a question the structures you already know cannot answer quickly, and the new structure arrives as the answer.
- ✓Who it's for: second and third years preparing for placements. Basic C or any one language is assumed.
- ✓Format: on-campus or blended, ~4.5 hours a day across five days, with problem-solving time built in.
- ✓Setup: GCC and VS Code, both free. Every visualiser on this page runs in the browser.
- ✓Built for interviews: the syllabus is the intersection of the university DSA paper and what companies actually ask.
What students walk out able to do
Analyse cost
Derive Big-O from code, not from memory
Choose a structure
From the operations a problem performs
Search & sort
Binary search, merge sort, quicksort
Build with pointers
Lists, stacks, queues, trees
Traverse a graph
BFS, DFS and shortest paths
Recognise DP
And turn exponential into linear
Learn to measure cost → then buy the structure that lowers it
Each day builds directly on the last, ending with problems students solve on their own.
Every session, in detail
The complete teaching material students work through — the problem first, then the structure, runnable C code, the mistakes everyone makes, and practice problems with solutions.
All 5 days published — 26 sessions
Projector-friendly slideshow — one session per slide. Use ← → to navigate.
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