
Computer Science Unplugged - mbrubeck
http://csunplugged.com/home
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KiwiNige
Reminds me if the time I was in as CS teachers office at uni getting course
changes approved. Wasn't till after I left his office that I realized what was
wrong with it.

He didn't have a computer. He taught mostly post grad stuff, how to build a
Turing Machine etc. that I never took so I didn't get around to finding out
what he researched.

Any way he managed to have a high level CS job with no computer in his office,
well not in plain view anyway and certainly not the centre piece on his desk.

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jhancock
Certainly the best article on HN in the last 48 hours. Very cool stuff. In my
part of the U.S., some public schools are talking about shortening the school
week 4 days because of funding problems. I've been thinking about what kind of
things I can do on a Friday to step in to teach if that happens. This is just
the kind of thing that could work.

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bwhite
Awesome. Another great resource in this mold is the book The New Turing
Omnibus by Dewdney.

"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about
telescopes." - Dijkstra

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whimsy
This was posted 498 days ago as well. Relevant comment page is here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=158948>

I'm not saying a repost is bad. We clearly have a lot of new users from the
last 500 days.

However, it would be cool if there was a way to automatically see when a page
got reposted, though, in case there was some interesting commentary that could
be revived from the first time around. That sort of function could add value,
I think. (This time around, it doesn't, really - only 5 comments with 7 karma
between them.)

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mgreenbe
This is great. Computation exists outside of computers, and this seems like a
great approach to highlight that idea. I only read
<http://csunplugged.com/~csunplug/programming-languages-0>, but it gives a
pretty good summary of the basic issues involved with programming a computer.
The ideas are relevant and interesting, and the absence of an actual computer
is barely noticed.

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_sh
Orthogonal to this is my all-time favourite, the paper enigma machine:
<http://mckoss.com/Crypto/Enigma.htm>

More for teenagers than younger children, working with it highlights a lot of
elements of cryptography. And its a real cipher, used by real Nazis! Also a
great way to introduce Alan Turing.

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apotheon
This is awesome. Seriously. Someone upvote this thing. I almost didn't see it
under the mound of Erlang.

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humbledrone
Initially, I thought that the "unplugged" idea was kind of silly, but after I
read about the parity check magic trick I changed my mind. What a good way to
explain parity!

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tdupree
I was surprised to see that they have a very nice mobile version of their site
for iPhone (and presumably others, although I only checked it on iPhone). This
is a cool resource!

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dylanz
What the... this is absolutely awesome. Showing some of these videos to my
kids tomorrow!

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xtho
"Unplugged" in the sense of "page not found". Or am I missing something? When
I open the homepage I get redirected to: <http://csunplugged.com/de/home> that
doesn't exist.

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gojomo
Advanced students can move to the CARDIAC!

[http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/02/cardiac-paper-
comput.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/02/cardiac-paper-comput.html)

