Resources by Computer Science Unplugged
Displaying 21 - 29 of 29
The Chocolate Factory - Human Interface Design
The aim of this activity is to raise awareness of human interface design issues. In a world where poor design is rife, people have become accustomed to dealing with problems caused by the artifacts with which they interact, sometimes blaming themselves instead of attributing the problems to flawed design. The issue...
The Muddy City - Minimal Spanning Trees
Our society is linked by many networks: telephone networks, utility supply networks, computer networks, and road networks. For a particular network there is usually some choice about where the roads, cables, or radio links can be placed. This resource explores the need to find ways of efficiently linking objects in...
The Orange Game - Routing and Deadlock in Networks
When there are a lot of people using one resource, such as cars using roads, or messages getting through the Internet, there is the possibility of “deadlock”. A way of working cooperatively is needed to avoid this happening. The resource begins with instructions on how to play the orange game. The activity contains...
The Peruvian Coin Flip - Cryptographic Protocols
This activity shows how to accomplish a simple, but nevertheless seemingly impossible task -making a fair random choice by flipping a coin, between two people who don’t necessarily trust each other, and are connected only by a telephone. The resource begins with a detailed explanation of the activity and...
The Poor Cartographer - Graph Colouring
Many optimization problems involve situations where certain events cannot occur at the same time, or where certain members of a set of objects cannot be adjacent. For example, anyone who has tried to time-table classes or meetings will have encountered the problem of satisfying the constraints on all the people...
Tourist Town - Dominating Sets
Many real-life situations can be modelled in the form of a network or “graph” of the kind used for colouring in the Poor Cartographer – Graph ...
Treasure Hunt - Finite State Automata
The students’ goal in this resource is to find Treasure Island. Friendly pirate ships sail along a fixed set of routes between the islands in this part of the world, offering rides to travellers. Each island has two departing ships, A and B, which students can choose to travel on in order to find the best route to...
Twenty Guesses - Information Theory
This resource asks the question ‘How much information is there in a thousand page book?’ It continues by exploring how to estimate how much space is needed to store the information and introduces a way of measuring information content. The resource begins by discussing what is meant by information and how amounts...
You Can Say That Again! - Text Compression
Computers only have a limited amount of space to hold information, so they need to represent information as efficiently as possible. This is called compression. By coding data before it is stored, and decoding it when it is retrieved, the computer can store more data, or send it faster through the Internet. This...
Pages
- « first
- ‹ previous
- 1
- 2
- 3