Advanced Topics in Computer Science
Unit 7: Heaps and Heap Sort
Students study priority queues and the heap structure that supports efficient access to the highest or lowest priority item.
Unit Focus
What this unit is really teaching
This unit connects tree ideas to array-based implementation and prepares students for scheduling, graph algorithms, and heapsort.
Key Topics
- +Complete binary trees and array representation
- +Min-heaps, max-heaps, heap order, and structural invariants
- +Insert, remove, peek, percolate up, and percolate down
- +PriorityQueue use cases and custom comparators
- +Heapify and heapsort
- +Runtime comparison with sorted arrays, linked lists, and binary search trees
Practice Work
Implementation and analysis tasks
Student task
Implement a binary heap-backed priority queue.
Student task
Use a priority queue to simulate task scheduling or emergency triage.
Need support with Unit 7?
Work through the concepts, code, edge cases, and runtime analysis with 1:1 guidance.