'15-'16 Bytes and File Sizes

I see this lesson as bringing something students use every day such as documents, songs, and pictures on their computers into the computer science area of size. I do not believe many students will know file sizes or how to find it and this lesson engages them in a practical way allowing for lasting comprehension.

Yes! I see that as well. It might be helpful to have some chart posted so that they can refer to it. Or maybe other form of visual representation.

I like the assessment question because itā€™s something that they can relate to.

I have found that file sizes and their implications are not well understood by my students. They have grown up with almost unlimited data storage, with the exception of their iPodsā€¦ This lesson should help them comprehend the data storage constraints.

I think I will be giving a lot of participation grades during these early sections ā€“ I want to make sure that the learning attitude that the students bring to class is an important part of this class.

I like this idea as a bell ringer for lesson 13. The bell ringer hopefully will reinforce all of the vocab that is acquired during this lesson.

I plan to use Kahoot also. I think it will be less intimidating.

I like how the students are asked to do some estimations and are then required to do some follow up research. I think this lesson would be great for all of my students who do not understand why it takes longer to print, save, send certain files more than others. We try to share that it has to do with the memory required to hold all aspects of what they are creating, but they are not always able to make the connection.

I intend to stick pretty close to this lesson plan. At the end of it, I might show them a few different PDFā€™s and ask them to determine how much memory is required to store/encode each one and explain why.

Each lesson builds on the next, it is scaffolded. Making sure students are understanding prior knowledge will help to ensure success. At this point, becasue it is my first go round with CSP, I plan to deliver lessons as they are. I am going to use group presentaion to make sure it works and have students peer reveiw for accuracy. If their presentaion has errors, I hope that the class can help them to correct them. I believe as we progress through the course some students will have a better grasp on content and will be able to help trouble shoot.

This is probably one of the easier subjects for my students to grasp. I will use all additional help i.e. internet sites to support learning.

This looks like an engaging topic as all students understand the importance of data and volumes of data in terms of their smart phones, wifi connections, internet connections, and size of hard drives on various devices. What this lesson is getting at is allowing students to investigate the mass of data that each file type occupies. I am thinking I may jig saw this a bit and have students share out about each of the various files types.

I canā€™t find the key for the assessment.

Hi Caroline,

We removed all the answer keys from the lesson plans and moved them on to Code Studio. They are linked for teachers on the 1st level of each stage. You need to be given access to answer keys. If you donā€™t have that let me know. (See the picture below)

-Dani

Kahoot for this lesson: https://create.kahoot.it/#quiz/80a58c1a-b32a-4992-b5aa-7a204e9a01c7

Iā€™m not giving this till Weds so let me know if you see any errors or have suggestions. Iā€™m wondering how deep to go with this, do we have any sense of what a typical question on the exam on this subject might be? I can easily see this getting to be a math word problem lesson, but I donā€™t want to go there if they wonā€™t need it for the exam.

2 Likes

At this point, I plan to deliver the lesson as presented. This should be fairly easy to explain and understand as students constantly save files on their flash drives or mp3 players and it will help them understand why they run out of space or how to determine which files take up more space than others.

When students were doing their research it lead to discussion about 1kB and 1KB 1000 vs 1024 bytes.

I donā€™t know if I didnā€™t facilitate this lesson well or what happened, but it seemed a little lack-luster until I the Kahoot that @caroline made - students always love a good Kahoot! I know this is important information, but it seemed to fall flat and some students were already VERY aware of it. The students were really interested in what really large volumes of data were for. I think an interesting extension would be to project when the total volume of data on the internet/world/etc. would reach other benchmarksā€¦ I am not sure if we have good trend-lines/predictions for this but I could see that being something my students would get more into.

One student found an error in the worksheet that asks students to rank the devices 1-7 but there are actually 8 listed.

I started with the ranking but did not give them the file sizes, and then had them research the terms. At the end we filled in the missing pieces together for the file sizes because I thought that would give it more meaning than telling them the file sizes at the beginning.

Thank you Kaitie for the thoughtful feedback on how your lesson went with students! Itā€™s awesome that you were able to use the resource that @caroline made to what sounds like great success in your classroom.

I have just updated the error that your student found in the worksheet and answer key. Thank you for reporting that!

-Sarah

You might want to check your conversion for #3

http://www.whatsabyte.com/P1/byteconverter.htm

Thanks for putting that together.

Dani,

I am unable to see the ā€œFor Teachers Onlyā€. I (think) can access all the other teacher resources.

If you could direct me in the right direction to fix this Iā€™d appreciate it!