University of Canterbury: Cs Unplugged: Programming Languages

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.

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 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.

A collection of hands-on, physically-active lessons for students ages five to twelve revolving around various computer science concepts.

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