I recently came across three excellent sites with a similar theme – teaching computer science concepts without using computers. Each has a variety of activities, lesson ideas, and lesson plans perfectly suited to the ITGS syllabus:
Computer Science Unplugged is a site I have known about for a while now. Its lesson plans involve a lot of kinesthetic activities – great for motivating students when learning quite difficult (and sometimes dry) topics. ITGS related lessons include text compression, image representation, public key encryption, and the Turing test. Computer Science Unplugged also has a downloadable PDF of all their lesson plans.
Computer Science for Fun (CS4FN) contains a lot of short articles. However, navigate to the teacher’s section and you will find a handful of lesson plans perfectly suited for the ITGS HL topic Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Expert Systems. I think the “Brain in a Bag” lesson in particular looks like an interesting way to teach ITGS students about neural networks.
Computing Science Inside probably has the most detailed lesson plans of the three sites mentioned here. Hidden inside its ‘workshop’ section, these can be downloaded with free (and easy) registration. Some of the lesson plans I will be investigating in the near future are “Getting onto the Right Page”, a great idea for helping students understand how search engines work, “In the picture” – a lesson about image recognition, and “Predictive Text and Machine Learning”.
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