Little do they know (a few years down the road), most of them will get work experience and complain that nobody uses linked list and trees. Heck, when a problem presents itself where linked list might be a great solution, they probably won't think to use it.
I think that this system of constantly bringing up linked lists, stacks, and queues for data structure is broken. A better format for teaching data structures would be to train the student's ability to come up with the right data structure for the problem they are solving. The ability to come up with solutions specific to a problem is the real skill and this skill will empower engineers come up with stacks, queues, linked lists when they need it.
Here's how I would teach data structures:
Ask student: 1. Let's say you want to build an elevator system. What classes would you need, and what properties / methods would each of them have?
2. You need to build a restaurant game. What classes would you need, and what properties / methods would each of them have?
+ a list of many other questions
Follow up to each of these questions would be for students to implement their data structures with provided assets to see their implementation come to life. Throw in firebase (realtime db) so students can interact with each other's games helps them see flaws in their implementation / data structure design. Its a great data structure + application development practice.
The analogy in math would be to expect students to derive the pythagorean theorem from scratch. Not only would this be a difficult task for most newbie mathies, you would also have a significantly smaller proportion of students arriving at the formula than by conventional means. It would be much more effective and efficient for a larger demographic of learners to show them the formula, explain how it's derived, and have them then apply it over multiple examples.
First you teach someone how to carve wood and basic physic. Then you give them different hypotheticals and have them build things that solve these problems. This helps them really understand the problem and how to solve different problems using their skillset. With this, they will be able to build what they need (boats, house, tables, chairs, etc.). Conversely, if you teach a student how to build a boat over and over again, I doubt they would be able to build a house.
Fundamentals: Classes, arrays, objects
Everything else is derived. Linked lists, trees, are not fundamentals.
Again, this is just my observations and I wanted to share.
But I get very frustrated whenever I see an argument for learning them like this one: "...knowing how to implement these data structures will give you a huge edge in your developer job search..."
This is what makes me worried/frustrated about the prospect of interviewing for a future software engineering job: the worry that they'll ask me programming trivia and miss the point that I'm kick-ass at my job and bring great bottom-line value to the company I work at.
On another note, I was playing Human Resource Machine recently and on one puzzle I said to myself, "this is a linked list!" having learned about it from an MIT lecture I watched at bedtime months before. Very satisfying nerd-validation.
Like all things, if you want to make a high building, you better have a strong base.
Now it's true that the grunt of a programmer's work won't be such a problem, especially since there is a need for more coders out there.
But still, I'd still prefer being conservative and be sure any average coder (even more so for an engineer) knows about some data structures.
I still vividly remember that time some student argued that vectors and lists were about the same thing.
Some more decent data structure vids.
Please note, if you click through and view it anyway, you may be tracked by the website hosting the embed."
