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Classroom Activities
The cs4fn team do a range of talks and activities. As with our writing they take a fun offbeat approach to the subject and are embedded in research activity. (Oh, and we tend to prefer rope and tube technology over silicon for our activities.)
We are giving live talks about our approach to teaching computer science in conjunction with Google in their CS on AIr series using Google Hangouts. The videos are available online.
We have written many of the activities up so that you can pick them up and use them in the classroom. We have used them in workshops styles and (more commonly) as part of interactive lectures. For example several of the Artificial Intelligence activities form a 90 minute schools lecture we have given to several thousand students of ages from 8 to 18 over the past few years. Our main aim has been to enthuse students about computer science and show how it differs to school ICT. We've therefore given these talks as part of General Studies classes, ICT classes, to whole year groups as a 'special', to ICT classes, to gifted and talented groups, to Psychology classes, ...
We are currently working with the computing at schools group to create a version that is linked to the national curriculum and suitable for teachers to deliver at KS3. Watch this space.
If you try out any of these activities, please let us know how it went by emailing us or filling out the form on the "Contact Us" part of the site (see the lefthand panel).
The Intelligent piece of paper
What is a program?
What is intelligence?
Hold a competition between an artificial intelligence: a "highly intelligent piece of paper" and a human. In this ongoing challenge between the best of humanity and the best of paper-kind the paper has an unbeaten record. It is yet to lose a game of noughts and crosses.
Also available in french german russian greek and slovenian via CS Unplugged [EXTERNAL]
Winning at Noughts and Crosses
What is a programming about?
How can computers win at games?
Explore programming without worrying about programming languages and investigate how a computer is able to win at board games like chess, by writing instructions to play perfectly at noughts and crosses followed by a tournament to find the best.
The Brain-in-a-bag
What is a neural network?
How can a working artificial neural network be created?
What is computational modelling?
After explaining how neurons in the human brain work we create an artificial version that is programmed to play Red-black snap. We then test it against other artificial brains.
The Emotional Robot Video
What might the Human-computer Interaction of the future be like?
How might neural networks be used to create human-like behaviour?
This short (1 minute) video demonstrates a robot created by a University student that reacts to the tone of a speaker's voice. It responds by changing its expression to suggest emotions such as happy, sad and surprised.
Create-a-face
How can you program a robot to react to and show emotions?
What is object-based programming?
The class make an affective (relating to moods and emotions) robot face out of card, tubes and themselves. It is programmed to react to different kinds of sounds (nasty, nice or sudden) and show different emotions (sad, happy, surprised). The class then think up some other facial expressions and program sets of rules to make the face show them to appropriate sounds.
The Sweet Learning Computer
How can a computer learn from experience?
The class challenge a machine made of sweets to the game of Hexapawn (a little like a game of chess with only pawns and on a 3x3 board). At the start the machine only knows the basic rules of the game. The more it plays the better it gets: when it loses the class punish it by eating its sweets allowing it to learn from its mistakes.
...and then there is Magic!
A wide range of computer science concepts from what an algorithm is to how medical tomography
works, error-correcting codes to human-computer interaction
...all illustrated through magic tricks.
Liven up a topic by introducing it using a magic trick. They are all easy to do self-working tricks. Challenge the audience on how the trick worked (unless they do believe you are psychic) and then explain some linked computer science. You can also download the pdf of our "Magic of Computer Science" booklet that supports our cs4fn magic show.
...and TuneTrace
TuneTrace is an iPhone app that turns real world drawings into computer programs that play music. We helped develop it at cs4fn, along with ImpactQM. We’ve made some classroom activities that you can use to teach students about computer programs and the scientific method.
