The use of pseudocode examples in CS program--is it plagarism?

Plagiarism is when you claim somebody else's work as your own. We most often hear about it with regards to words or images, but it can just as easily be applied to other types of intellectual work as well, including pseudocode.

The critical question, then, is whether what you have done can be reasonably understood to be claiming the work as your own. This depends on the particular assignment, but the cases here fall into two general categories:

• If the assignment is asking you to create a piece of code, then finding a piece of pseudocode that does the same thing and translating it would be plagiarism because you are pretending to have created the code yourself, when in fact you have not.
• If, on the other hand, the assignment is asking you to create a complex system, one component of which happens to be implemented using a subroutine that you have translated from elsewhere, then it is essentially the same as finding an appropriate library call and entirely acceptable (unless there were rules clearly intended against such). In this case, the creative work is the assemblage, and you are not representing that particular fragment code as your own --- though it is best practice to be explicit about your sources in comments, for copyright and license reasons.

Given that your professor was encouraging the use of outside resources as part of the project, it seems to me that what you describe is both ethical and normal practice.