Northwestern University frames lessons which bring computational thinking enhanced activities into STEM classrooms.

This computer programming game allows students to learn how to write code. Learners write code in real programming languages.

Students examine and record data about the impact human activity has on a local aquatic environment in this teaching unit. They then analyze the information and develop a plan for improvement. The unit depends on being able to take the...

Find engaging ways to integrate visual art and music into regular classroom instruction and strengthen cognitive thinking skills and abilities to reason creatively from multiple perspectives. Get great classroom questioning tips, case...

[Free Registration/Login Required] Need help determining fake news from real news? This seems to be a problem today. Find practical activities and questions to help navigate a media landscape in which it is increasingly difficult to tell...

This document contains the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner published by the American Library Association. The standards provide a conceptual framework and broad guidelines for describing the information-literate student. These...

This lesson engages students in learning about light through multiple sources. Students will learn how light is produced, reflected, refracted, and separated. Students will communicate their findings through an independent project that...

This site describes several ideas and activities to use with picture books and intermediate/middle school age students. Specific title to use are also given.

Learn how compressed formats such as zip, gzip, or gif images are all based on a method called Ziv-Lempel coding, which turns out to be an interesting exercise in finding patterns in text.

This activity uses variations on the game of 20 Questions to demonstrate how we can quantify information content, which in turn shows us how to store and share it efficiently when it comes to computer technology.

Explore the main algorithms that are used as the basis for keyword searching on computers, using different variations on the game of battleships.

Many clever algorithms have been devised for sorting values into order efficiently. In this activity students compare different algorithms to sort weights to simulate how computers devise sorted lists.

A student team activity that demonstrates an approach to parallel sorting, or how much computation can be done at the same time. It can be done on paper, but the lesson becomes more meaningful if the students do it on a large scale,...

This puzzle shows young scholars the decisions involved in linking a network between houses in a muddy city. It can lead on to a discussion of minimal spanning tree algorithms for optimizing networks.

Computer networks are based on passing messages from computer to computer. This sounds simple in principle, but in practice all sorts of contention and bottlenecks can occur. This activity gives some first hand experience of such issues,...

Students learn what information makes up a protocol for bits of information added to messages to make sure they are sent over the internet.

This student activity is based around a fictitious pirate story which leads to the unlikely topic of reasoning about patterns in sequences of characters. Experiencing this concretely will help lay the foundation for understanding finite...

Help build the foundation of understanding computer languages with this activity. Demonstrate some of the issues that arise when we try to give precise instructions to achieve a desired outcome.

Introduce graph coloring, and lead students on to many variations and extensions that reach the cutting edge of computer science.

This activity explores the dominating set problem, and sets it up as the basis for a the public key encryption activity.

Steiner trees are another way to approach finding efficient networks between points. This is another tough problem from computer science, converted into an activity which is easy to explain, with variations suitable for higher-level...

This surprising technique discovered by computer scientists that seems impossible allows people to share personal certain kinds of information accurately without having to give up any privacy at all.

This is another activity that achieves something that doesn't seem possible- people who don't trust each other and can't see each other are able to agree on the outcome of a random coin flip.

This student activity about public key encryption allows learners to simulate encrypt and decrpyt messages without having to share a password to unlock them.