Computer Science Unplugged Class Summary 10/21/13

with Leigh Ann Yoder

Huffman Code and Decision Trees

The first half of our class this week was spent learning a method of text compression referred to as Huffman Code. The Huffman Code offers a solution to representing text while minimizing the number of bits used. One of the main purposes was to introduce the concept of a Decision Tree, which was defined in class. I want the students to gain confidence working with Decision Trees as we enter our second unit. They began working on their own Trees in class and have been asked to complete them for homework.

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Decision Tree

Information Theory

The second half of the class was devoted to our new topic called: Information Theory, although the students will not yet recognize that terminology. We are working through a set of familiar activities to help us quantify how much information something has. We used games similar to Twenty Questions and Hangman. I am trying to lead them to quantify an abstract concept. This is not an easy lesson, even for adults. We worked slowly through several scenarios, and will continue with more difficult ones next week.

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