So I'm a BIG fan of Andy Weir's The Martian. The book is beyond excellent and because he originally published it chapter-by-chapter, he had many fans and scientists check the science. It's pretty much all correct. As a fan of sci-fi but also TRUE SCIENCE, I appreciate this. Also, he has some clutch JPL and Caltech shout-outs in there, so I have to be a fan. Needless to say, when the movie came out in 2015 I geeked out. Now what does this have to do with teaching and my programming class? Well, there's a very crucial moment when the main character, Mark Watney, must use an ASCII table and decode hex messages from NASA. My students have already learned hexadecimal representations of numbers. It's a quick jump to see the relationship to letters, and after this, we're going to start some more intense cryptography tasks. I wanted to start the new semester off with something fun, so I used The Martian scenario as inspiration.
Tag: computer science
Example Warm-Ups: Programming Fall 2020
You may know, I love a good 5-minute warm-up to start each class. I've ALWAYS used these in my Algebra 1 classes, but when I heard we'd be entirely remote again this fall, I thought it'd be good to do warm-ups in all of my classes and it's totally paid off.
“COLBAORATORY” – CODING WITH GOOGLE
In my Programming exposé post, I described how coding went from being one of the scariest things to teach to one of the funnest. I also mentioned that this year I'm using Google's interactive Python notebook, Colaboratory, as the coding environment for my students. If you're familiar with Python programming, it's Google's version of Jupyter notebooks. If you're not familiar, keep reading! I'll explain! Colab would've been WAY too fancy for me to use last year, but I reached out of my comfort zone this year and am SO happy that I did!
Julia Ziac 