I chose a sign in/out for my room. It has student name, period, time in and out, location (rest room, early release, guidance, administration). I was not very successful. I felt like, as someone pointed out in a previous post, that I was creating a database. I was able to get something on paper, with the help of the forum. I am quite concerned that I would not be able to explain the task, especially since I was not able to understand it. How am I to presume a class full of 10th graders will?
Being a very novice guitar player, I wanted to cook up a protocol for expressing a guitar strum in âtabâ. Please poke holes in this and let me know what Iâm missing. This was fun.
Learning how to play the guitar at Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago (great place for anyone to go when visiting the city, BTW), I always found guitar âtabâ fascinating as an example of encoding a âcomplex thingâ in a way that was bite-size enough for newer guitar students to quickly pick up on where to put their fingers and less on reading sheet music.
In thinking through the protocol (rather late at night), I would want to include the following:
1.) For each guitar string, either a âPâ for playing that string in a strum or âNâ for not playing that string in a strum.
2.) For first guitar string (high e), if it is played, a number between 0 - 12 representing which fret will be immediately in front of the finger when it presses down on the string.
3.) A space as a delimiter.
4.) Repeat of steps 1 - 3 for each of the subsequent 5 strings on the guitar.
I chose an old dial up phone and a means for sending text. It basically involves choosing the correct dial for say the letter K, then dialing that letter. Since K is the second of three letters on that number, then you would hold the dial in place for two seconds to select that letter. The code is a 7-bit system with the dial number represented by the first four digits on the left, followed by a three digits on the right that represent the number of seconds the dial is held in place.
C would be presented by 0010011 - 0010 equals the number 2 followed by 011 which equals 3 for the three seconds that I would hold the dial in the final position.
Before I teach this lesson, I think that I will teach students basic information about relational databases, and the difference between those and flat databases. I agree with Juan that this is a very important concept in many business and govât applications. MS Access provides a powerful but relatively easy to understand data model. The lesson concept is good but has not been brought down to student level yet. They need help practicing with the idea before they have to create a model.
Hey Sharon (and interested other readers),
Thanks for letting us know what you thought. We just wanted to register that your comments have been heard and there are plans in place to respond so stay posted on this forum for more.
This project was designed to cap off a unit where students had studied and designed encodings for many familiar digital media, like numbers, text, formatted text, and images. Having mastered these familiar encodings, we want students to see that they are just as capable of creating their own binary encodings for anything they want. I and a few other teachers ran a version of this project last year where we essentially said âDesign your own binary encoding for anything you wantâ and we found a few things.
1.) Students were REALLY excited about this project and teachers were too. Thereâs so much creative potential and students felt empowered to show off both their knowledge of a subject of their choosing and their newly developed knowledge of binary encoding. Students picked all kinds of topics to encode and produced an impressive array of encodings.
2.) Teachers were struggling to give students guidance on how to organize their projects, and grading was even more complicated. It was a lot of fun, but the project needed more structure, especially to run in larger classes.
We took this feedback and tried to come up with a structure that preserves the creative possibilities of the project (âEncode anything you want!â) and communicates more clearly to students and teachers what a final project should look like. The result was the version of the project currently published. As you note it does look a lot like a relational database, but that wasnât in order to meet any CSP learning objectives. It was a structure we were familiar with and that we thought we could simplify to a level where students could easily map their projects to it.
What weâve taken from this new round of feedback is that the complexity of the structure we provided is overshadowing the excitement we wanted students (and teachers) to feel. This is a problem and one weâre working to fix. You should not have to add your own supplementary lessons in order to ensure students are prepared for and understand a unit project. Beyond the content of this project, however, we want to make sure the âfeelâ of it is in keeping with the rest of the class. Itâs supposed to be a fun project where students can combine their own interests with the computer science content theyâve learned, and we donât want the way we structure or present the project to cause friction in that process.
Keep an eye out here for more updates as we look to make improvements. Thanks Sharon and everyone else for your feedback. Itâs an important part of this pilot and is only helping to improve the materials we make available.
Sincerely,
GT and the CSP Writing Team
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I am not there yet but I think it will be very challenging for my students to complete this lesson. I plan to chunk the lesson. One suggestion that will probably work is having a selection of ideas for the students to choose in one lesson. Then creating an artifact. I am not sure, yet and welcome any ideas. Thanks!
Iâm not even close to this point in my lessons. I am really not sure the best way to deal with it, but wil probably divide the work into manageable chunks with clear deadlines. This also bring to forefront that students need to keep clear notes from all the prior lessons and any worksheets that they have completed.
Hello Everyone!
We have been working hard to respond to some of your questions and feedback regarding the Unit 1 Practice PT and are excited to announce we have launched an updated version of the PT which is now live on Code Studio. Links to both the new and old docs can be found in this folder as well.
If youâve already started using the old version thatâs fine. Most of the work done to create this new version of the PT involves clarifying objectives, providing guidance on the specific steps of completing the project, and narrowing the scope of deliverables. The biggest changes you will notice are:
- Students encode an experience (e.g. âGoing to a birthday partyâ) rather than choosing any complex thing they can think of.
- Students no longer create a bit-by-bit protocol (using the table format) for the whole encoding. Instead they create a much simpler tree diagram visually demonstrating how theyâd break down their topic and only create a detailed encoding for a small portion of it.
- Instructions in general are shorter, clearer, and are built around a student-facing example.
- Worksheets to guide different steps of the process are provided
Weâre hoping this new version of the activity is easier to run, serves as a fitting capstone to the unit, and continues to prepare students for the structure of the PTs. Just like on the performance tasks, students will need to select a topic of personal interest, use their CS knowledge to complete the project, exchange feedback with a peer, and reflect on their work in writing. We also hope this project is an exciting opportunity for students to see how almost anything might be encoded in binary and reflect on the impact of their choices on how that is done.
Thanks to all of you for your comments and ideas on this project. It is hard to overstate how seriously we on the CSP team take your questions and concerns, and our hope is that in so doing we get to enjoy hearing more of your success stories. We look forward to receiving your thoughts on the new version of the project, and wish you a lovely rest of your week.
Best,
The CSP Team
This was a challenge for me and Iâm sure for my students (I have some background that they will not likely have). I attempted to encode music and chose the bassoon excerpt from Paul Dukasâ âThe Sorcererâs Apprenticeâ (love the piece and my son is a bassoonist). I had to build a dictionary to encode repeated measures to slim down the length. It will be fascinating to see what students select and their encoding schemes.
Can someone post a resource (short lesson or video) that we could use to end this unit about developing protocols? I want to summarize what students should finally get about protocols - what information to include. Since I am not confident myself about this topic and could use a simple straight forward resource for this.
Could teachers share their quizzes/tests for the unit?
I asked Jeremy Kubica, the author of computation fairy tales to write a story to help understand encoding. I think its great, hope you guys also enjoy it. 
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hey, sangeeta!
weâre working on building out some google drive folders that are private to CSP piloters for sharing materials like this-- weâll send out details on how to access as soon as theyâre up and running!
Hey Caroline, this is great! I remember you talking about these at PD but I had no idea we could make suggestions for new fairy tales. Thanks for suggesting and sharing!
hi, sangeeta!
we can definitely look into creating a resource to clarify what we want students to leave the unit knowing. i would say that at a high level, we want students to walk away with two main understandings:
first: unit 1 is about encoding information. information is encoded in layers that are built on top of each other. no matter how complex the information is, if you can figure out a way to break it down into binary, then that means we can represent it on a computer (this is basically the unit 1 practice performance task)
second: when we talk about protocols in unit 1, weâre really talking about the process of doing the encoding described above. here, students develop protocols, or detailed instructions for creating these encodings.
Thanks Brook. This is really helpful.
As I am grading my students work, I am noticing that they are using the ideas of encoding and protocols interchangeably. For example, one of my students wrote the following.
- "It is necessary to break down complex components of information if it is needed to be represented on a computer because of the specificity required to inform a computer on how to decode a certain protocol. Often times if every combination of a protocol is not accounted for in a computer system, then the whole protocol will be misunderstood/not executed correctly. "
It seems like there should be a distinction there. For example, to encode information you use a protocol. The protocol helps you interpret the information into something meaningful for either humans or computers - it takes a look at the bigger picture. Encoding information is one part of a protocol - it takes basic information and puts it into binary information that the computer can understand. Is there a distinction between protocols and encoding information? If so, am I close to the mark? Are your students doing the same thing?
Also, for the record, my students did not have any trouble getting started on this project. I let them work with a partner which seemed to help them get the ball rolling. They are still still struggling with knowing how much information can be represented with x-number of bites. I will need to go back and do some re-teaching on that content. I think a day spent converting from binary to decimal to hex as well as computing how many values can be represented with x-bits would be useful for next year too in the unit.
Many of my students are misunderstanding how to make the diagram. Letâs say weâre talking about the birthday party example. They might make something like⌠âdecorationsâ => âballoonsâ => âcolorsâ⌠which is all good⌠but instead of putting â(ascii)â at âcolorsâ, they do âcolorsâ => âredâ, âgreenâ, âyellowâ . Theyâll put the actual âanswersâ.
The frustrating part is I donât know how to explain to them what the concept is⌠all I can say is⌠âNo⌠donât put that stuff⌠donât put like⌠the actual âanswersââ⌠and students will be like⌠âhuh?â And then I get frustrated with trying to explain what I mean. I want them to understand the concept⌠I donât want to just tell them what to do⌠but I donât get why so many of my students will add those âanswersâ.
I gave them the handout with the birthday party example beforehand. CHILDREN. WHAT IS SO DIFFICULT ABOUT THIS. AND WHY CANâT I EXPLAIN THIS SIMPLE IDEA OF NOT PUTTING THOSE LAST⌠THINGIES.
Did anyone else have surprising difficulty getting their students to construct their diagrams?