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What is unplugged?
What is unplugged?
CS Unplugged is very much based on a constructivist approach: students are given challenges based on a few simple rules, and in the process of solving those challenges they uncover powerful ideas on their own. Not only is this a more memorable way to learn, but it empowers them to realise that these are ideas within their grasp. The activities are also very kinesthetic - the bigger the materials, the better.
Why do we teach unplugged activities?
Young students will be empowered to understand the great ideas that computer science covers, without having to become expert programmers first. They won't be learning exactly how to build the next search engine, social network or game app, but they will have an idea of what sort of techniques are needed to make it successful. The purpose it to enable them to see digital systems as something that they could understand and, for some, create themselves.
Five reasons to teach unplugged activities:
Show students that the skills they are developing have real-world applications
Students learn to break down complex problems into manageable parts
Recognise patterns
Develop algorithms
Think logically and sequentially about a problem.
Lesson Ideas
Lesson Ideas
How Binary Numbers Work
How Binary Numbers Work
Links to Maths, Computational Thinking.
Sending Rockets to Mars
Sending Rockets to Mars
Links to Oral Language, Geometry, Numeracy, Directionality.
Divide and Conquer
Divide and Conquer
Links to Statistics, Numeracy, Computational Thinking.
Lesson Resources
Lesson Resources
The CS Unplugged material is open source on GitHub, and this website's content is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The CS Unplugged is a project by the Computer Science Education Research Group at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Icons provided generously by icons8.
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