Comparing and contrasting algorithms is better than sequential presentation

In five days, I'll be heading to ICER 2013 in San Diego, where I'll be presenting a paper "Comparing and Contrasting Different Algorithms Leads to Increased Student Learning" (pdf here).

The findings in a nutshell: if you present two different approaches to solving a compsci problem side-by-side and have students compare them, the students will understand the problem better than if you present those approaches sequentially. And importantly, the students will be better transferring their understanding of the problem to similar problems.

Why is this notable? Because the sequential approach is pretty much ~95% of how we teach algorithms and data structures! Just this past term when teaching CS2 I did things this way: a unit on binary trees, then a unit on BSTs, then a unit on heaps. Yet the evidence we have here is that it's better to show algorithms/data structure variation in parallel.