I teach an undergraduate outreach class. The goal of the class is to equip our undergraduate students with skills, ideas, and supplies to go out to K-12 schools and teach about computer science.
Students are divided up into groups and given projects to work on or jobs to do such as contacting schools, etc. We try to use items that already exist as well as creating some of our own. I am a big fan of videos that express computer science concepts in a unique way, especially the work that Tim Bell has done to put his CS Unplugged activities into video format. It should therefore come as no surprise then that one of the assignments my outreach class was given was to create a video that could be used by K-12 teachers to portray a concept and submit it to the SIGCSE video exhibition. If you would like to watch our video on recursion, visit this link: http://youtu.be/9n8aT0sQxjs or search for “The Recursive Case” on YouTube.
Another fun series of videos were shared with me this morning. Perhaps some of you have already seen this, but it is just hitting our inboxes in the Midwest. Looking for a new way to teach sorting? Give this a go:
http://www.youtube.com/user/AlgoRythmics
I share these ideas with you, not necessarily to promote these specific videos, but to open dialog for others to share fun things they have seen!
So post away in the comment section and let us all know about some of your favorites so we call all fill our tool belts of resources!
Mindy Hart
CSTA Board of Director