Computer Science Unplugged

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

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

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!

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!

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

"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.

Advanced students can move to the CARDIAC!

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/02/cardiac-paper-comput.ht...