Funded Oct 3, 2019Thanks so much for funding this: this provides me with much-needed hands-on materials for better teaching computer science.
We will now be able to create binary counting using actual pulses of light, and in conjunction with a metronome, we'll simulate clock pulses and bitrates... and with the science kits, we'll be able to perform other exploration of computer science fundamentals.
My students are inquisitive, and so it's much better for teacher and student to provide them with some guidance, and then think how *they* would figure out the problem: then, when we look at how it's actually done, not only does that "make sense", it's also encouraging to the students that they thought of something similar!
In yesterday's lesson, for example, the students thought about how to encode letters (and digits... and punctuation... and emojis...) and came up with their own encoding. So ASCII made sense to them, following that exploration (even if there weren't emojis when ASCII was first formalized!).
So thank you very much. In addition to coding, using laptops and working on paper, having these materials will allow me to better conceptualize binary, counting and other computer science ideas!”
With gratitude,
Mr. Ball