University of Canterbury: Cs Unplugged: Programming Languages

This activity explores just how hard it is to get things right when it comes to designing good interfaces for computers.

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.

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 students 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,...

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...

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.