Heaps vs. Heaps

I've been teaching Plymouth State's Data Structures course every semester and hope to keep teaching it for a while.  Each project covers a different data structure... and a combinatorial game that uses that structure.

Unfortunately these two universes conflict over a term: Heaps.  The piles of sticks in Nim are usually referred to as heaps.  However, in CS a heap is a binary tree structure with a specific recursive property: each element is bigger (or smaller in a min-heap) than both child elements.  (There's more to it than just that, but that's the big deal.)  Currently we talk about heaps in class, but I don't have a project that includes just them.

It was brought to my attention last semester that some of my code is confusing for people with CS background.  Many of the games students play are Nim-based, and they often have a getHeaps() method that returns the data structure containing the Nim piles.

Sadly, I've decided against the Combinatorial Games language:  I'll replace the term "heaps" throughout my projects with "piles".  I'll be making these changes over the next two weeks and they'll show up in my projects starting this fall.

Sorry CGT, but people say "piles" anyways.