<story><title>CS Unplugged: Computer Science Without a Computer</title><url>https://csunplugged.org/en/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>csours</author><text>Inspired by this, I led a group of 5th graders and high school students through a &amp;quot;peanut butter and jelly sandwich robot&amp;quot; exercise.&lt;p&gt;I had a blast and so did the kids.&lt;p&gt;We had them list some steps to make a pb&amp;amp;j sandwich, and then I, as the robot acted the steps out as literally as possible.&lt;p&gt;When they said &amp;quot;gather materials&amp;quot;, I went around the room and picked up erasers, markers, water bottles; whatever I could find.&lt;p&gt;When they said &amp;quot;put the knife in the peanut butter&amp;quot; I stabbed the (plastic) knife through the cardboard seal.&lt;p&gt;When they said &amp;quot;put the peanut butter on the bread&amp;quot;, I put the jar of peanut butter on a slice of bread.&lt;p&gt;After all of that we showed a video of an industrial robot applying sealant, just like we spread the peanut butter and jelly.&lt;p&gt;At the end we asked how we could have done it better, and one of the kids said &amp;quot;Get a smarter robot&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d highly recommend doing something like this for a STEM day, or just for fun.</text></comment>
<story><title>CS Unplugged: Computer Science Without a Computer</title><url>https://csunplugged.org/en/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>toomanybeersies</author><text>Tim Bell, one of the creators of CS Unplugged, was one of my lecturers at the University of Canterbury, and before that he taught me the fundamentals of computer science at the NZ Olympiad of Informatics training camp when I was at high school. It would be fair to say that he&amp;#x27;s a significant part of the reason I&amp;#x27;m a software developer.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve never met a man so passionate and interested in the pedagogy of computer science. I&amp;#x27;d say that he&amp;#x27;s one of the leading figures in pre-tertiary (primary and secondary school) computer science education in New Zealand. I think that science pedagogy is a massively underserved field of academia. Everyone wants to create new theories and breakthroughs, but nobody wants to figure out how to teach them.&lt;p&gt;The way that he manages to use practical demonstrations to teach computer science theories and algorithms is brilliant. It really helps make algorithms click with a lot of students. It was refreshing to have him as a lecturer as opposed to some of the lecturers who were clearly did it because they were required to, not because they wanted to.</text></comment>