Learning Greedy Strategies at Secondary Schools: An Active Approach

We describe an extra-curricular learning unit for students of upper secondary schools, focused on the discovery of greedy strategies. The activity, based on the constructivistic methodology, starts by analyzing the procedure naturally arising when we aim at minimizing the total number of bills and coins used for giving change. This procedure is used as a prototype of greedy algorithms, whose strategies are formalized and subsequently applied to a more general scheduling problem with the support of an ad hoc developed software.