Pixels, Post-It's® and CS Principles (Abstract Only)

Jeffrey L. Popyack; William M. Mongan

doi:10.1145/2839509.2850565

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Pixels, Post-It's® and CS Principles (Abstract Only)

Jeffrey L. Popyack and William M. Mongan

Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, pp 696-697

17 Feb 2016

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2839509.2850565

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Abstract

Computing methodologies -- Computer graphics -- Graphics systems and interfaces -- Graphics file formats

Computing methodologies -- Computer graphics -- Image compression

Social and professional topics -- Professional topics -- Computing education -- Computational thinking

Social and professional topics -- Professional topics -- Computing education -- Computing education programs -- Computer science education

Social and professional topics -- Professional topics -- Computing education -- Informal education

We describe an "unplugged" activity that exposes data structures and algorithms involved in image representation and compression, using multi-colored Post-It Notes®. We use Post-It's to illustrate how color images can be encoded and decoded so they can be stored efficiently on a computer and/or transmitted efficiently across a network. This provides an intuitive illustration of bitmaps and the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), optimized with Lempel-Ziv compression. The algorithms are simple to explain and comprehend, and simultaneously appeal to the participants' sense of art and creativity while demystifying advanced computing concepts and computer graphics. We describe two sample exercises which make use of these concepts. In one exercise, teams of participants create messages with Post-It's, encode them and send them to other teams for decoding. In another exercise, a larger image is encoded and broken into letter paper-sized smaller images to be decoded and reassembled by a group. This activity has proven to engage participants with a wide variety of backgrounds, and provides the background needed for further exploration and discussion of Computer Science Principles, specifically the Big Ideas of Creativity, Abstraction, Data and Information, and Algorithms.

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Title: Pixels, Post-It's® and CS Principles (Abstract Only)
Creators: Jeffrey L. Popyack - Drexel University
William M. Mongan - Drexel University
Publication Details: Proceedings of the 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education, pp 696-697
Conference: SIGCSE '16: The 47th ACM Technical Symposium on Computing Science Education
Series: ACM Conferences
Publisher: ACM
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Language: English
Academic Unit: College of Computing and Informatics
Other Identifier: 991021870307704721

Pixels, Post-It's® and CS Principles (Abstract Only)

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