Computer Science Camp 2009

Number of students: 6?

Monday (July 13th)

1. Introduction
   • who's who?
   • name tags
   • a break every ~50 minutes; lunch 11:30am-12:30pm
   • cscamp account, USB drives
2. Hardware vs Software
   • machines vs instructions
   • car vs driver
   • brain vs thinking
   • Activity 1
   • Activity 2: X steps outside, Y makes up a task, students write down instructions, X performs the instructions, was the task acheived?
   • Activity 3: repeat Activity 2, importance of precison and initialization
3. Alice tutorial 1: skating
4. Design a skating routine: a. skate to four corners in a square; b. skate to the back (jump), front (spin), left (fall on face) and right (fall on back)
5. Implement a skating routine
6. Discussion

Tuesday (July 14th)

1. What can software do? (web, email, audio, video, robots)
   • Computer animated movies
   • Teaching a robot
   • Stacking blocks
   • The Great Robot Race, NOVA, PBS
   • Urban Challenge
   • small robot soccer, humanoid soccer
   • Autonomous helicopter
2. What can't we do if we don't have computers?
3. Activities
   • search engine simulation: pages, summarize each page in three or fewer words, build index--each word followed by page number(s)
   • email simulation
4. Alice tutorial 3: adding characters; supplement: do together
5. Design a story: add a charater, move together to the back, front, left and right
6. Implemnent a story
7. Discussion

Wednesday (July 15th)

1. How can software be built? How to represent/write instructions? (languages, bytes, bits, binary vs decimal)
   • Alice has a language, what do the other languages look like?
   • binary, decimal, hexadecimal (binary activity; stand=1 and squat/sit=0)
   • powers of ten (powers of ten video, powers of ten pdf), powers of two
   • encode English sentence, decode English sentence (ascii table)
   • given Russian/Cyrillic words, compose a Russian sentence ("instruction"), encode the Russian sentence, give it to classmate to decode (code charts)
2. Alice tutorial 2: adding dialogs, methods
3. Design a story: create methods for "fall on face", "fall on back"
4. Implement a story
5. Discussion

Thursday (July 16th)

1. Software (instructions) vs data (image, sound, video)
   • color chart (colors in numbers)
   • pixels: Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Level 4, Level 5, Level 6, Level 7
   • picture/image--a bunch of color dots [pixels] (draw a picture using only dots; encode a picture, classmate decodes )
   • video--a sequence of images (small book of ~20 pictures, flip through them quickly)
2. Alice tutorial: create methods to change scenes, conditional, loop
3. Design a story: blind fish finding snail
4. Implemment a story
5. Discussion

Friday (July 17th)

1. How to solve problems with software? (algorithms)
   • linear search: different ways of finding a Russian character
   • binary search: phone book
   • sorting: smiley faces
2. Alice tutorial: events for interactive movie
3. Design a story: create whatever they like
4. Implemment a story
5. Discussion