Does an algorithm really make a difference?: A hands-on experience

“I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.” Motivated by this famous saying, this paper attempts to demonstrate the importance of an algorithm through a hands-on experience over the problem of finding the amicable number pairs in a range. An algorithm may work just fine for solving this particular problem when the range is small, but it may fail when the problem size gets bigger. This work tries to justify the validity of the previous sentence through the eyes of the second-semester computer engineering freshmen enrolled in an introductory level object-oriented programming course taught by the authors of this paper.