CS in Education Week – Monday

Starting the week by asking students to create a tour around some of Stonehaven’s places of interest (image by serenestarts CC0)

The next seven days heralds CS in Education week around the world. I wanted to continue to promote Computer Science within my school by sharing a resource and short video every day with the school community.

Code.org has a lot of great videos to inspire future computer scientists. I selected Computer Science is Changing Everything to show that these are skills which pervade almost every job and allow companies and individuals to improve using data analysis, robotics, predictions or simulations.

To begin the week I decided to focus on some unplugged computer science. Everyone will have at some point in their lives given directions to another person. If written down and repeatedly followed this is essentially an algorithm: a recipe to solve a particular problem.

For the challenge task I was inspired by The Tour Guide activity by Queen Mary University of London. I decided to alter their task to give it some local relevance and fit it to a single page.

The document above can also be accessed here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VgdMkBy21pqJdAmfKYOLQUycOxH53jPZu6o4QyV3xfY/edit?usp=sharing

Are you a CS educator? What are you doing in your school / college / university / local area to give others a chance to learn more about the field of computer science? Please share your ideas in the comments section!