
CS Unplugged: Teaching material for CS using cards, string and crayons - catchmeifyoucan
https://www.csunplugged.org/en/
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userbinator
Several decades ago, "without a computer" was the norm, because they were
expensive, noninteractive, and/or difficult to access. You had to write your
entire program before being given a chance to run it, and if there were any
errors, you had to wait possibly a very long time before you could run it
again.

Now that computers are ubiquitous and nearly everyone can immediately start
writing code, I still think there are many advantages of doing it the "old
school" way. Many of the highly-skilled developers I've worked with started
learning with no constant access to a computer, so I definitely think this
form of teaching is very useful --- without a machine "doing some of the
thinking" for you, as it were, it forces you to actually understand the
problem more deeply, so that you can tell the machine what to do. Those
developers are also the ones who will spend more time whiteboarding or writing
with pencil and paper than they do writing or debugging code.

Also, I thought this image depicted students being handed stacks of 5.25"
floppies in their protective envelopes:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/cs-
unplugged.appspot.com/stat...](https://storage.googleapis.com/cs-
unplugged.appspot.com/static/img/general/how-do-i-teach-this.png)

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benj111
If your country had CS for 5 to 10 year olds several decades ago you're lucky.

I think for that kind of age range physical is better than digital anyway. But
as you point out it's still useful for us bigger children too.

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a-saleh
This would be the norm for ~15 year olds in my country, ~15 to 30 years ago?

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jerodsanto
We did a deep-dive on CS Unplugged with the program's creator, Tim Bell, on
The Changelog last year.

Link to the transcript, for those curious:
[https://changelog.com/podcast/302#transcript](https://changelog.com/podcast/302#transcript)

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ashtonian
I learned doing ACSL exercises on paper starting in middle school. We had
excercices for things like Boolean algebra, graph theory, base conversion ect.
As well as 5 hacker rank style programming questions throughout the semester,
in addition to our more regular CS coursework. Teacher made us keep an
organized notebook with printouts of all our excercices/tests ect. Thought it
was rediculous and old school but wasn't even 5 years before I looked back
with gratitude. Learned the fundamentals needed to get me through 2/300 level
courses at college. The teacher was amazing and in large part the reason I'm
remotely successful today. There were 13 - 20 kids each year that took more
then the intro courses. He would always treat us like family, and would do
things like have us all meet after school once a year in fancy clothing for a
"mock" fancy meal. It was so he could teach us (some autistic) how to be
proper at a dinner and which fork is used for what. He taught us how to be
skilled programmers and also people. Random middle of nowhere public high
school in PA, very grateful. The teacher was deathly terrified of birds tho.

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AlphaWeaver
I've run these activities with kids (middle and high) and adults (teachers)
and they have always been remarkably engaging and surprisingly effective at
conveying the concepts each lesson is supposed to teach.

I would 100% recommend using them if you ever get a chance to construct a CS
fundamentals curriculum.

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joelkevinjones
Do not use string, index cards, and multiple CS PhD students holding the cards
to illustrate how garbage collectors work, particularly if most (all?) of the
people in the groups haven't written a garbage collector. Trust me on this.

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Redoubts
As someone who hasn’t written a GC, why is this?

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daveFNbuck
As someone who hasn't written a GC, how well do you think you could illustrate
how one works in a live presentation?

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dang
A thread from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661707](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661707)

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grenoire
Wow, this is an amazing pursuit. I would love it if kids were introduced a bit
earlier to more analytical thinking methods thru ways such as this. Learning
about computer science has benefits in changing the way you approach concepts
and problems, but kids shouldn't have to wait until middle-high school!

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olliej
Tim is also a great lecturer (I had him as my lecturer many years ago), and
one of the authors of Managing Gigabytes, - which for many years was
apparently basically required reading at google - which is a great intro to
all the normal compression systems, as well as large scale text search

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BossingAround
And here I was, thinking 'huh, they finally condensed down deep CS topics so
that my dumb ass can understand it! Neat!' Imagine my disappointment looking
at the ages section.

Still, a neat idea! Just not for my dumb ass.

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tmaly
I have been building a course for my 5 year old using Scratch. She has a ton
of fun working on the material with me.

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zakki
Do you plan to publish the courses?

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tmaly
Yes, I will publish it near the end of summer.

I have all the lessons written, but shooting videos and post production takes
time.

My daughter also does some of the video shoots. We have to do a few different
shoots of each scene and then choose among the best.

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failrate
This reminds me of dorkbot and runme.org. :)

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mrcactu5
does the United States have any such programs?

