Computer Science-in-a-Box: Unplug Your Curriculum

http://www.ncwit.org/unplugged

Computers are everywhere. But how many of us understand how they work, or how they think? Computer science explores these questions. Every student can benefit from an introduction to the science that is possibly most central to their lives — computer science.
Computer Science-in-a-Box: Unplug Your Curriculum introduces fundamental building blocks of computer science — without using computers. This selection of activities is designed for use with students ages 9 to 14. Use Computer Science-in-a-Box: Unplug Your Curriculum to teach lessons that explain how computers work, and at the same time, address critical mathematics and science concepts from number systems and algorithms to manipulating variables and logic.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 94,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 4 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 107 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 656 posts.

The busiest day of the year was September 20th with 530 views. The most popular post that day was Block diagram of a computer and parts of a computer.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were search.conduit.com, google.com, google.co.in, search.dogreatgood.com, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for block diagram of computer, block diagram of a computer, computer diagram, computer parts diagram, and computer diagram for kids.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Block diagram of a computer and parts of a computer October 2007
7 comments

2

Examples of bad user interface design March 2008

3

Text to 8-bit ASCII converter October 2006
3 comments

4

Tutorials for GIMP April 2007

5

Data logging in Lego Mindstorms NXT 2 February 2009
1 comment

Garfield High School Computer Science Web site

http://www.garfieldcs.com/

 

A Web site for some computer classes at Garfield High School.

Tutorials for GIMP

GIMP is a fun, though complex, tool for students to use to learn about image processing. Here are some good tutorials:

http://gimpguru.org/Tutorials/RedEye2/

http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node68.html

http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node80.html

http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/index.html?node61.html

http://www.gilesorr.com/papers/gimp-tutorial/gimp.html

http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6750

http://carol.gimp.org/gimp/tutorials/basics/layers.html – very good!

http://www.gimpguru.org/Tutorials/ReplaceForeground/

http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/tutorial/Layer-Mask-basics-in-gimp-87.html

http://ocaoimh.ie/2004/10/01/cartoonizing-photos-with-the-gimp/

http://www.designyourownweb.com/gimp/layers-gimp/layers-gimp.html – video about layers

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms

http://www.llnl.gov/visit/home.html

This is really for scientists but it probably could be used for teaching some basic data visualization.

VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range.

Ecycling

http://www.sciencefriday.com/kids/sfkc20051125-2.html

Information on E-Waste and the recycling of it.

How Google works

http://www.google.com/librariancenter/articles/0512_01.html

How does Google collect and rank results?
One of the most common questions we hear from librarians is “How does Google decide what result goes at the top of the list?” Here, from quality engineer Matt Cutts, is a quick primer on how we crawl and index the web and then rank search results. Matt also suggests exercises school librarians can do to help students.

Information about Fractals from fractalus.com

http://www.fractalus.com/info/

Collected here are a number of pages describing various aspects of fractals.

Includes results of a recent fractal arts contest.

http://www.fractalartcontests.com/2006/winners.php

GIMP Tutorials

http://truehacker.blogspot.com/2006/12/gimp-complete-tutorials.html

A list of a lot of GIMP tutorials.

Fractals and Fractal Dimensions by Alan Beardon, University of Cambridge

http://motivate.maths.org/conferences/conference.php?conf_id=1

* An introduction to fractals, including what they are and some of their applications.
* The dimension of fractals.. Exploration of the idea of dimension and calculations for the dimension of some self-similar fractals.
* Five fractals to explore.. Explore the properties and appearance of fractals.

Includes some problems.