Teaching CS without a Computer

About

Despite the name - Computer Science is not just about computers! This means that CS concepts can be taught without the use of computers, perhaps when you don’t have access to a computer lab or when you are teaching students without the ICT skills needed for programming.

Unplugged methods have been a popular way to introduce Computational Thinking. In this activity, we will work through 2 different examples of this approach: Computer Science Unplugged and My Robotic Friends.

The presentation (as a PDF file) can be downloaded here.

Computer Science Unplugged

Computer Science Unplugged (or CSUnplugged for short) is a collection of free activities that teach Computational Thinking. In this activity we will work through the Binary Numbers and Image Representation resources.

The worksheet for the CSUnplugged part of this activity can be downloaded here.

The original version of these activities and many other similar activities are available on the CSUnplugged website. This website has an interactive version of the cards and automatically shows the conversion between binary and decimal numbers.

My Robotic Friends

My Robotic Friends is an unplugged activity developed by Thinkersmith. In this activity some students (the “programmers”) write instructions for other students, who act like robots, to follow in order to build a stack of cups.

The worksheet for this activity can be downloaded here.

The original version of the activity is available for download here. This video shows some examples of the activity in action.