Using CCG cards to teach computer science

I published a new activity for teaching computer science searching/sorting concepts. It's designed for middle school students, although there's no reason why it wouldn't work for upper elementary or high school students.

Using CCG cards to teach searching/sorting

It introduces algorithms for searching and sorting by using Collectible Card Game (CCG) cards – like Magic the Gathering or Pokemon cards – as objects for the students to search/sort.

An advantage of using these cards is that they are easy to hold and don't take a lot of room, so each student can easily manage 10 cards on a standard school desk. And the activity scales to more or less cards, or students can work in groups if needed. The cards are also cheap (or free) if you're willing to look around, but you can always just go to the store and buy some (convenient if you're traveling and left your teaching props at home).

I've run this activity in a number of classes in different schools and it's a great way to demonstrate how these algorithms work.

Google engineers visit local schools to promote CS

Official Google Blog: National Engineers Week 2011: Classroom visits inspire students to pursue CS

National Engineers Week outreach - Having engineers visit local schools

Recent K-12 outreach where Google engineers go out and visit local schools and talk about computer science:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/national-engineers-week-2011-classroom.html

Yes, that's my byline on the blog post. It was a lot of fun doing these visits (although it required a lot of prep-work in advance to get things set up).