CS Unplugged – Computer Science without a computer

I remember one of the first realizations I made as an undergrad was that CS != code. I think this book does a good job of removing the two from the beginning, and it would have been useful for me to have instruction like this when I started learning. Later on I realized that most jobs that ask for a CS degree don't actually have you doing any computer science. More often you are glueing together tools or writing a…

Several decades ago, "without a computer" was the norm, because they were expensive, noninteractive, and/or difficult to access. You had to write your entire program before being given a chance to run it, and if there were any errors, you had to wait possibly a very long time before you could run it again. Now that computers are ubiquitous and nearly everyone can immediately start writing code, I still think there are many advantages of doing it the "old school"…

Inspired by this, I led a group of 5th graders and high school students through a "peanut butter and jelly sandwich robot" exercise. I had a blast and so did the kids. We had them list some steps to make a pb&j sandwich, and then I, as the robot acted the steps out as literally as possible. When they said "gather materials", I went around the room and picked up erasers, markers, water bottles; whatever I could find. When they…