Computer Science Unplugged
Some time ago I found a video on YouTube that looked pretty interesting, and I decided to watch just a bit of it to see whether I liked it. One hour after, I had watched the whole thing and was fascinated by what I just saw. That video was called “CS Unplugged”.
This video is part of a project created by the University if Canterbury (New Zealand) and also sponsored by Carnegie Mellon and Google, and that had as its (initial) goal to show children (around 10-13 years old) what Computer Science is REALLY all about. They have developed a nice series of activities that instigate the curiosity of the children and make them understand the fundamental concepts of, among others: binary codes, compression, sorting, searching, human-computer interaction, information theory and public-key criptography.
I was VERY enthusiastic about the whole idea, and also a bit jealous of those kids: they had a deeper and more inspiring class on Computer Science than several CS bachelor students get from their lecturers! This video also inspired me and reminded me once more of an old dream: teach Computer Science to school children. So, there you have it, the AWESOME “CS Unplugged” video: