'16-'17 General Discussion for Lesson 1.10

Use this thread to discuss your questions and comments about how to run the lesson.

One of the (actually 2) questions in the Activity Guide for Routers and Redundancy asked the students “How many messages passed through your Router?” … Is this the Routed Packets count under the Router Stats ? The students are not understanding the difference between messages and packets at this point ?

Hi All, I did this lesson AND the “How Routers Learn” optional lesson.

My students have been moving through the lessons pretty fast (or I haven’t been providing enough time for discussion… one of the two). Last year when I did this lesson it got a little goofy with students writing bizzare things (to inappropriate things) in the traffic. I am fine with a little silliness, but learning stopped so this year I combined the two lessons and it worked really well. We were still talking about routers and redundancy, but it gave students something new to do.

Students commented “this is the most fun class” #TeacherWin

Also, a little sad that more classes can’t be that fun… but I’ll take it!

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Hi @wingchoi

In this lesson students should not have learned about packets yet. Packets come up in lesson 11. So any messages students send in this lesson are sent in one chunk or one packet. Does that help answer your question?

-Dani

Thank you for your response. The questions that my student had and I couldn’t figure it out either was:
“How many messages passed through your Router?”

I think they would have to open up the Router Log and physically count the messages that arrived at their router,
is this correct ? The problem that came up was that I have a large class and by the time they got to that point
in the questions, there were more than 200+ messages and physically counting it would be laborious. That was also why I started to look under the Router Stats box in the widget - to see if there’s a way that the tool might have already summed it up and had that stats available - rather than hand-counting through the router log.

I don’t think that there is any stats available. I had my students scan the log and their answer was “too many to count” :slight_smile:

There were only 2 students in my class that actually hand-counted. The rest stated the same “Too many to count” - which makes the next question about the percentage moot.

How do we find the optional lessons? You mentioned “How routers learn.”


kaitie_o_bryan6d
Hi All, I did this lesson AND the “How Routers Learn” optional lesson.

My students have been moving through the lessons pretty fast (or I haven’t been providing enough time for discussion… one of the two). Last year when I did this lesson it got a little goofy with students writing bizzare things (to inappropriate things) in the traffic. I am fine with a little silliness, but learning stopped so this year I combined the two lessons and it worked really well. We were still talking about routers and redundancy, but it gave students something new to do.

Students commented “this is the most fun class” #TeacherWin

@sean.boston if you click on the “Unit 1” on the top of the curriculum page, it takes you to the curriculum overview. That’s where you can see links to the optional lessons.

https://curriculum.code.org/csp/unit1/

They are highlighted in orange text there.

Did you also do the optional lesson before how routers learn?

@sean.boston No, but I could have. I think the other Algorithm ones are good, I just felt like this one on “How Routers Learn” was particularly relevant to this lesson. I also knew I did not want to spend a whole hour with this specific lesson on Routers and Redundancy.

My students have been going pretty quick through this material - faster than last year, so I felt this was a natural extension of the unit/lesson.

I also think the lesson on “Encoding Numbers in The Real World” is a good one for students to know and shows relevance to why we care how many bits we use. I might use it in Unit 2, Chapter 1 since the PT has to do with encoding data.

I found out in the teacher view of the log you can copy and paste the logs into excel. Tonight I am using excel’s sort feature to make up example sheets for the students to do in class tomorrow.

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We would love to see the example sheets. Please share!

I am sorry about the upload. The forum will not accept excel files. These are a few of the workbooks distilled from the complete router log.
I let them see almost all of the conversations one way or another in these spreadsheets. Traffic Logged by Router 14.docx (16.6 KB)
Traffic Originating from Router 14.docx (15.9 KB)
Traffic Sent by Router 14.docx (13.0 KB)
Message series.docx (15.1 KB)
I saw this as a teachable moment for my students to learn about ethical behavior and how there is not as much online anonymity as many believe.

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hey, @dmm7520! sorry that the forum wasn’t accepting excel files-- that should be all set now!

So the gist of this is you can copy and paste the entire log (from the teacher view) into excel. Then you can use excel’s sort features to dissect the data for the students into workable examples. If I had discovered this before the 23rd hour I would have had a better plan to incorporate a little excel sidebar lesson into my curriculum and made the students distill the data. Attached now is the entire excel file I worked with and its many workbooks.Router Log.xlsx (59.9 KB)

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BTW turns out the select copy and paste into excel works in Firefox for me but not IE.