Working on some lesson plans for teaching introductory computer science concepts to middle and high school students this afternoon – and revisiting the CSunplugged.org website for the first time in a long time.

If you haven’t learned the underlying concepts, have a family member who would like to learn (child _or_ elder), the series of videos on the site (also the participation activities and lesson plans) do a really good job of explaining how binary encoding works, compression, image representation, parity (checksums), as well as explaining the origin of many words.

This is a really good series, which demystifies a lot of the techniques developed over the past sixty years that allow us to program computers effectively. Watch it. Even old school pros will be enlightened.

 

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