Computer Science Outreach Materials

Scratch full-day workshop

Discussion Points:  The materials for this workshop were used with 23 6th graders from Price Laboratory School on May 15th, 2008.

Morning Activities consisted of

• the standard introduction lesson expanded a little bit to take up approximately 90 minutes in a morning session.  Students work one student per computer

Afternoon Activities consisted of

• An hour of code exploration.  Students selected a partner and were instructed to open a previously written program, explore how it works, and then answer a series of questions designed to get them to consider a variety of actions possible with Scratch.  After each activity we had a group debrief to look at the possible answers to the questions regarding that program
  • the questions
  • a zip file of the programs used (all but one of these are distributed by default with Scratch but they were pulled into a separate directory to make locating them an easier task)

  What isn't clear in the previous materials is that after we did the debrief on program #4 (the fish chomp) we looked at adding a score variable to the game (since variables hadn't been seen prior to this).

• The sixth activity in this questionaire above asked students to explore some additional pre-loaded game (from the base Scratch installation), figure out how it worked, and write their own questions about it.  this was about 30 minutes in partners followed by some communal sharing time.
• Finally, we ended by dividing the class into groups of 3-4 and asking them to begin to plan a game they wanted to write/code.  We spent ~30 minutes in planning.  Teams will work on these games back at PLS after they return and will have an open house to show them off after approximately one week.

Scratch half-day workshop

Discussion Points:  The materials for this were used with two different groups of students during the spring of 2008.  The first time was with thirty-one  4-6th graders in a 3 hour workshop during spring break of 2008.  The exact same materials were used with 25 9-12th graders from the Educational Talent Search group at UNI on May 1st, 2008.

• Introduction Lesson "Plan"
• St. Patrick's day game
• Zipped directory of game images

Dyersville-Beckman visit, Spring 2008

Discussion Points:  This talk attempts to engage students in the topic of computers through the concept of steganography (hiding messages inside of media files).  It begins with a magic trick where the presenter guesses the student's "secret number" through what later turns out to be the use of binary.  This introduction to binary leads into a discussion about storing data on the computer in number format, then as characters (ASCII code), then as picture files.  Finally, we talk about using this knowledge to hide messages inside of picture files.

The talk also introduces algorithms and big-O by demonstrating an algorithm that rescales an image in half - a process that takes ~20 seconds the first time, but closer to ~5 seconds the second time.

The materials provided include a file with several python methods that work inside of JES to demonstrate the actual encoding of text inside of pictures.  Similar code could be written using the Java version of the MediaComputation materials from Georgia Tech.

• Zipped version of all materials
• PowerPoint Slides (for preview purposes)

Dyersville-Beckman visit, Spring 2007

Discussion Points:  This particular talk was a broad introduction to "what is computer science" where the suggested answer is "a tool (that allows people to accomplish tasks that might be difficult if not impossible without the computer)"  The talk discusses several applications of computers in the research of members of the department.  It concludes with the idea that even if students don't major in computer science they want to consider colleges where the CS faculty can teach them how to use computers as a tool in their respective discipline.

• PowerPoint Slides