Topics

We will jump around in the topics below. This list is subject to change and will likely change substantially this semester.

Real vs. Fake

Classify the following names as "real" or "fake"

1. John Wright
2. Nyphadora Birdstream
3. Mary Johnson
4. Tangy Tumblesprite
5. Cornelius Copperdrop
6. Jimmy McNulty
7. Daeneryrs Targayen

What issues arise? Why?

With developments in science and widespread reporting around the world, all sorts of unusual items appear in the news.

Apply the rubric you have (originally written by the other group) to one of the following:

1. Introduction to Martin Luther King Jr. www.martinlutherking.org
2. Dangers of Dihidrous Monoxide www.dhmo.org
3. Report on N. Korea Leader Kim Jong-Un at bit.ly/uickjun
4. Pacific Tree Octopus zapatopi.net/treeoctopus
5. Treating DSACDAD with Havitol havidol.com
6. Use of Rennets in production of Cheese savetherennets.com
7. Sound in Mind and Body picture at bit.ly/dudepic
8. Kite Surfer Surprise at bit.ly/surfersurprise
9. Architecture (with Owen and Gail) at bit.ly/myarchpaper

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Introduction

• How comfortable are you with computers? Stand in a spot in the room on a "line" with one end being very comfortable, the other not at all comfortable.

What is a computer?

• Activity: Journal Entry: Create list of computers in the room. Discuss with elbow partner / small group. What is/isn't a computer? How would you categorize them?
• See the Atlantic article on how the definition of what a computer is has changed. [Thanks to Blake Vaught]
• Assignment: Interview a friend or family member and ask what features they would want if buying a new personal computer. Consider uses, price range, performance, size. Consider the following components, and look them up if you don't know what these are:
• Processor, Operating system, Memory, Hard Drive, Optical Drive, Monitor, Video card, Sound card, Speakers, Keyboard, Mouse
• Here are two sites you can use to find more information on the above terms:
  • http://www.howstuffworks.com/pc.htm
  • https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs101/hardware-1.html
• During the next class, discuss with your group and select one family interview to present.
• Consider an abstract model of how a computer works, with the CPU (brain), Memory (temporary storage) and a Hard Drive or a Solid State Drive for long term storage.

Brief history of Computing, Kinds of computers; Hardware & Software

Search Engines

• Activity: Consider how you would find: a translation, an address or phone number, movie show times, comparison between video creation software packages, word definitions, video on how to cut your own hair, algebra tutorials, tallest ladder in the world, ugliest dog
• Activity: Web 2.0 sites are those where users create content, such as bookmarking (delicious.com), restaurant reviews (yelp.com), Pictures (photosynth.net), list creation (workflowy.com), product review sites. What are others you know of? What are some you wish existed?
• Consider the Wayback Machine. What are the implications of this?
• Compare Wikipedia and an Encyclopedia site such as http://www.britannica.com. How can you tell if the contents of a site is reputable? Come up with a rubric. Apply your rubric to http://www.martinlutherking.org

How Computers Have Changed Communication

• Journal: Think of personal communication before the Internet, before cell phones. (Consider making a date, getting homework help, making a business deal, having a party, buying an appliance.) Have you ever been in a situation without modern technology? What are the advantages / disadvantages?
• Ethics / Privacy issues. In particular consider examples where what used to be private is now public, Identity theft, the Harvard Dean scenario, physical scanning.

Telling a story with Data

• Different points of view on the same data can tell a different story.
  • Activity: Room activity
• Related: See this NY Times interview of Cynthia Dwork talking about algorithms and bias

Using the computer as a tool to visualize, model, design, program

• Activity: Following Directions quiz
• Activity: Making a sandwich
• Activity: Drawing Pictures

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Are computers intelligent? Consider the Turing Test.

Divide up into groups, where each group chooses one of the numbered items below. Be prepared to demonstrate and explain to the rest of the class. After you understand and have explored the item, consider the questions shown below

1. Watch a summary clip of Watson playing Jeopardy. Consider why this is important, as described in this article and this explanation by IBM. (Consider doing your own web search.) Did Watson do well? What indicated Watson might not be human? How do you suppose Watson is able to perform competitively with the best human Jeopardy players?
2. See the demos on Google's AI Experiments page.
3. For each of the applications below consider 1. How do you think it works? What is it paying attention to / pattern matching / inferencing? 2. How might this be extended and/or used in some meaningful context?
   1. Teachable Machine lets you train a neural network to differentiate between images or sounds
   2. Quick, Draw! recognizes what you sketch. Based off of accumulated drawings, sketch-rnn takes what you start and completes the sketch.
   3. For a picture or Street View, listen to the estimated accompanying sound in Imaginary Soundscape. (Experiment with the "Random" button at upper-right). You can also supply a link to an online picture to be analyzed. Similarly take a picture and have thing-translator recognize it and translate into some other language.
   4. See how people have associated words using the Sematris games.
4. Think of something and see if the computer can guess it in 20 questions at 20q.net
5. This is similar to the pattern matching used on brain waves (after training using an FMRI machine) that lets you "see" what a person is thinking about. Click on portions of one trained brain model to show which type of words are mapped to which brain areas.
   1. Consider an algorithm that matches patterns to previously seen images and collaboratively creates, such as in True Colors.
   2. Microsoft's https://www.how-old.net/ (may be slow) guesses the age of people in a photo. Face recognition is used in many different applications, but Joy Buolamwini points out the perils of over dependence.
   3. At bit.ly/aiguess see if you can out-guess a computer doing pattern matching, that tries to forecast if your next guess will be 0 or 1. Expose the data tables behind the scenes to see how it learns.
   4. See if you can tell the difference between poetry written by humans or by computers at http://botpoet.com/quiz/dwf/

Questions for the above activities:

1. Is there a difference between smart and fast?
2. Is keeping track of lots of details the same as smart?
3. Does context make a difference for smart? Can a person be street-smart but country-dumb?
4. In the above examples, is the computer intelligent? Why or why not? What does it mean to be intelligent?

Sorting

See a sample C++ program to compare different sorting algorithms. In case they are compatible with your version of your operating system, here are a Mac version and a Windows version.

Scratch Examples

Scratch is getting an upgrade! Preview it at: preview.scratch.mit.edu

For the third assignment we partnered with Farrah Falco and the 3rd grade children at nearby STEM Magnet Elementary School. Each 3rd grade child supplied some character names and a plot idea. These were used by our students to create a children's story that had to incorporate some interaction and different backgrounds. Here are a few of the stories created:

Data Analysis

Creating Maps

Data Visualization: plots, different kinds of data, trends

Using data to pursuade

Google mash-ups

Food-happiness data project:

For some period of days, every time you eat record the following 4 things:

1. What day it is
2. When in the day it is
3. Where you are
4. How happy you are

Then together with your group come up with a single representation that you can use to store all of your data. Then come to agreement as a class on a single representation. Use a Google doc to create a place where everyone can store their data.

What does this data mean? What sorts of questions can we ask / not ask? How reliable is the data? What would we want to be different if we could go back and do it again?

Examples:

• See this dataset of room happiness data taken at an area school. [Thanks to Baker Franke for this]
• After trying your own hand at visualizations and graphing the data, see the graph below for one example [again thanks to Baker Franke.] The chart below shows student happiness at various times and places during school days.

Assignment: What is the most common password? [Thanks to Don Yanek]

Concept: Illustrating the power of large datasets Talk about Wordle. Examples using large groups of words (e.g. Macbeth from project Gutenberg.) Consider the dataset of Sony passwords stolen by hackers. Which password is most common?

Problem Solving

Problem solving strategies

Binary Numbers:

Activity: Mind Reader game; Using 0/1 cards

Digital Logic

Activity: Build a full-adder

Linear vs Binary Search

Sorted vs Unsorted Lists

Using Spanning Trees to solve problems

Problem Solving-related TED talk videos

Watch: Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a Better World

Write an outline of this talk on your online journal page on your website and comment on the following:

1. In light of the talk, how do games affect you?
2. Take a look at the game Evoke. What do you think?
3. Think of what is involved in solving problems in gaming. Is this transferable to the "real world?"

Related to the ideas of Problem-Solving, consider the following videos/texts. For each of them consider what contributed to problem-solving in each situation. Are these strategies transferable?

1. Q & A with Jane McGonigal: Games that launch companies, Games that Heal [text]
2. Sunni Brown: Visualizer and Gamestorming (6 minutes)
3. Doodling can help you focus and solve problems
4. Amy Smith: Simple, Lifesaving Design (15 minutes)
5. Cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries.
6. Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in Action (20 minutes)
7. Solving problems by paying attention to how Nature does things
8. Gever Tulley: Teaching life lessons through Tinkering (4 minutes)
9. Once kids are given the tools and allowed to "fool around," interesting things happen.

Web Design

See this page for more details on Web Design.

For web site prototyping see the Marvel App. See the 90 second tutorial video.

Programming using Scratch (Interspersed throughout schedule)

Start up Scratch at Scratch.mit.edu. (See the preview 3.0 version at preview.scratch.mit.edu)

Resources: The topics below refer to the following:

Exploring Computer Science [ECS] Scratch curriculum (pdf) and examples (zip)

Lou Lahana Scratch lessons

Scratch Reference Guide, containing general interface description as well as description of various blocks

Instructions for class use:

In your group choose one of the topics below. Figure out what the main ideas are and create a simple example in Scratch to illustrate the main ideas, which you will present to others. Take a look at the resources and / or links to help you.

Topics:

1. Simple program:
   1. sprites, background
   2. Example: Aquarium
   3. movement ], bounce on edge, say, think
   4. Example: Animated story
2. Sound
   1. Example: Self-portrait (If working in class, make the artistic part very basic and focus on recording and playing sounds.
   2. Example: Slide show (Use any pictures you find online for now)
3. More Features:
   1. Mouse and keyboard input
   2. Variables & continuous motion
   3. Conditionals (if-then)
   4. Examples: marble racer, maze navigation, car race (1 & 2 player)
   5. AND, OR, Random
4. Event-driven programs: broadcast & receive messages to communicate between sprites
5. Example: Role-play
6. Randomness & Timers
7. Examples: Pong
8. Lists
9. Example: Rock-Paper-Scissors
10. Scrolling Background version 1, walking and version 2
11. Pico boards
12. Web Services

Scratch extended: SNAP where you can more powerfully combine functions.

Interactive Music and Art

Scratch can be used to make music interactively, such as this live piece by Alex Ruthmann. [Links in this section thanks to Andy Kuemmel]

This idea was inspired by Andrew Sorensen. You can see one of his interactive concerts here.

Andy Kuemmel has these ideas in a 5-day curriculum of activities, including the interactive art of weavesilk.com

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

See the demos on Google's AI Experiments page.

For each of the applications below consider 1. How do you think it works? What is it paying attention to / pattern matching / inferencing? 2. How might this be extended and/or used in some meaningful context?

1. Teachable Machine lets you train a neural network to differentiate between images or sounds
2. Quick, Draw! recognizes what you sketch. Based off of accumulated drawings, sketch-rnn takes what you start and completes the sketch.
3. For a picture or Street View, listen to the estimated accompanying sound in Imaginary Soundscape. (Experiment with the "Random" button at upper-right). You can also supply a link to an online picture to be analyzed. Similarly take a picture and have thing-translator recognize it and translate into some other language.
4. See how people have associated words using the Sematris games.
5. Think of something and see if the computer can guess it in 20 questions at 20q.net
6. Consider an algorithm that matches patterns to previously seen images and collaboratively creates, such as in True Colors.
7. This is similar to the pattern matching used on brain waves (after training using an FMRI machine) that lets you "see" what a person is thinking about. Click on portions of one trained brain model to show which type of words are mapped to which brain areas.
8. Microsoft's https://www.how-old.net/ (may be slow) guesses the age of people in a photo. Face recognition is used in many different applications, but Joy Buolamwini points out the perils of over dependence.
9. At bit.ly/aiguess see if you can out-guess a computer doing pattern matching, that tries to forecast if your next guess will be 0 or 1. Expose the data tables behind the scenes to see how it learns.
1. See if you can tell the difference between poetry written by humans or by computers at http://botpoet.com/quiz/dwf/
   1. Is the interactive creations of weavesilk.com art?

Robots

Bionic Arms NY Times article. [Thanks to Dave Hayes]

NY Times article on training robots to have human-like dexterity. [Thanks to Dave Hayes]

What is the Internet

See this TED talk by Andrew Blum, discussing the physical parts of "the cloud".

Tools

Graphics

Viewer: Irfanview

Image Manipulation: GIMP

Composite Images: Andrea Mosaic

Media Player: VNC

Hosting: Hostrocket

Cloud Storage:

Backups: Mozy, Carbonite, Crashplan

Music: Amazon, Google, Spotify

Open Office

USB: Portable Apps, USBGeek.com

Programming your world: Arduino kits

Computer Ethics (Interspersed throughout schedule)

[Much of this material from a Computer Ethics Course]

Benefits and Risks of the Digital Explosion

Rise and Stall of the Generative Net, Wikipedia Lessons

Privacy & Personal Information (For instance see this site for a Google map of past locations.)

1. Personal data likely still remains after a factory reset of an Android phone.
2. Facebook allows location data to be shared

Are Bits Forever?

Search Ability Gives Power

Encryption & Cryptography

Intellectual Property: Copyright Law, Free and not-so-free Software

Freedom of Speech: Censorship, Children, Anonymity, Spam, Open Access

Reliability, Accountability, and What can go Wrong

Computers' Impact on Society

The CrowdBeauty program has been trained and used to automatically identify aesthetically pleasing Flickr photos overlooked by humans.

Cyber-Security: Viruses, Internet Crime

Technology & People

From Thoreau's Walden:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation…. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

During Thoreau's lifetime the railroad and telegraph came to supplant traditional transportation of goods, travel and information sharing on foot and horseback. Thoreau wrote:

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man…. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.

TED Talks (and such)

These talks by leading experts are 15 minute-long introductions to cutting-edge technology and thinking:

1. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Microsoft's Photosynth
2. Luis Von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration
3. Pranav Mistry: Sixth Sense Technology
4. Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world
5. Johnny Lee demos Wii Remote hacks
   1. 3D printers: Anthony Atala: printing a human kidney
   2. YouTube video explaining complexity (P vs. NP), why some things are harder to figure out than others.

Silicon Valley (PBS American Experience)