07 December 2009

Octal counting worksheets

I've added a couple of worksheets for practicing with writing numbers in octal to the cse4k12.org website.

These worksheets can be used by students to practice counting/converting numbers in octal. They each show a set of circles that the student must count in both octal and decimal. The circles are arranged in groups of eight to make the octal calculation straightforward.

06 December 2009

cse4k12 ~ resources

Over Thanksgiving I started playing around with App Engine and threw together an a fairly simple app for keeping track of Computer Science (& Engineering) teaching resources.

I probably would have waited a bit before making it available, but with Computer Science Education Week going on right now, I figured that this was as good a time as any.

It's running at http://cse4k12.appspot.com/ and you can use it to search for resources by topic, add comments/reviews or you can add links to your own material.

It's still fairly early and I'm still going through and adding all the material that I'm aware of - I'll be adding it piece-by-piece as I get around to it. If you know of anything that is not listed, then please feel free to add it.

Authentication... sigh...

The thing that bugs me the most about it is that, while no login is required to access any content on the site, you do need to login in order to add resources or comments. This is to help prevent people from spamming the site with useless comments/advertisements.

I didn't want to force people to create yet another account/password just for this site, so you can use your Google account (gmail account) for authentication. And no, this doesn't mean that you give your password to us - what happens is that we send you to Google where you login and then they send back a token that says "the current user has successfully logged in as xxx@gmail.com". That's all we get: your email (well, and a "nickname"). Which is great because we don't really want or need anything else.

Of course, this doesn't help you if you don't already have a Google account. While it's easy to create one, you'd probably rather use your Passport or OpenID account or whatever it is you use on a day-to-day basis. I plan on adding support for these different authentication providers, but haven't had a chance to do it yet. Please let me know if you would find this useful so that I can prioritize adding support for this.

15 November 2009

Updated bitmap (binary/hex) worksheets

I've updated the bitmap (binary/hexadecimal conversion) worksheets. There is now an instruction sheet that contains 5 bitmap grids for students to create their own bitmaps plus 2 grids for them to convert from hexadecimal into a bitmap.

There are also blank worksheets (grids only - no instructions) for 8x8 and 16x16 bitmaps.

17 October 2009

Slides for AMS 2009 workshop

These are the slides for the "Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom" workshop that I presented yesterday at the AMS Fall 2009 conference.

I added an extra slide to include a diagram of a ripple carry adder.

Slides are available in the following formats:
Note that the PDF and PowerPoint versions were converted from the original OpenDocument format file. Because of the conversion, a few of the slides look a bit funky in the PowerPoint version. If this is a concern, please use the OpenDocument (using OpenOffice) or PDF (using Adobe Reader) version.

How Computers Work (high level)

This is an activity for 3 students to work together as a group. Each student takes on the role of a different part of the computer:
  • CPU
  • ALU (& memory)
  • Graphics display
They work through the project with the CPU running the "program", the ALU performing the math and keeping track of the variables, and the display plotting the values as needed.

The purpose of the activity is to give the students a sense of how computers work at a reasonably high level.

I created this a while ago, but neglected to actually post the information here. Full information about this activity can be found at http://cse4k12.org/how_computers_work/index.html.

Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom

I gave a "Computer Science Education in the Montessori Classroom" workshop at the American Montessori Society (AMS) Fall conference yesterday.

The workshop description that we submitted (oh so many months ago) was:
How can we better prepare our children for life in a high-technology society? How early should we teach them computer and pre-programming skills? How can we integrate computer science education into Montessori classrooms? This presentation of Montessori-friendly and age-appropriate activities will include stand-alone activities and extensions to existing classroom curricula as well as a take-home list of some useful online resources for teachers.
Looking back at this, it sounds sufficiently vague that I probably could have talked about anything as long as I mentioned computers every so often.

The following would perhaps have been a better overview:
Why aren't we teaching pre-programming skills (binary, boolean logic, transistors) to our children during elementary school? Why don't we teach students how computers actually work instead of simply how to use them? In this workshop, we will show (1) how computers work and (2) how you can teach these concepts to your elementary/middle school classroom.
A part of me wants to say something more confrontational like "how we're failing our students by not providing a solid understanding of computer technology", but I'll resist the urge and hold off on that rant (until another time perhaps ^_^).

I'll be posting the slides here once I get a chance to upload them.

cse4k12.org vs. cse4k12.com

Grrrr....

cse4k12.org is supposed to be the main URL for the website and cse4k12.com is supposed to simply redirect to .org.

Unfortunately, it looks like things are set up screwy and .org no longer redirects to the right place. I'll have to fix that but in the meantime all of the cse4k12.org links in the blog were not working.

Temp fix: change all the links to .com. I'll change them back once I fix the issue with .org, but for now if you have problems with any .org address, just change the "org" to "com" and it should work.

[Update: This has been fixed. All .org links are working again.]