Classroom Resources

Today, Carrie Anne is going to take a look at how those transistors we talked about during the last episode can be used to perform complex actions. With just two states, on and off, the flow of electricity can be used to perform a number of logical operations, which are guided by a branch of mathematics called Boolean Algebra. We’re going to focus on three fundamental operations - NOT, AND, and OR - and show how they were created in a series of really useful circuits. These simple electrical circuits lay the groundwork for our much more complex machines.

Today, we’re going to take a look at how computers use a stream of 1s and 0s to represent all of our data - from our text messages and photos to music and webpages. We’re going to focus on how these binary values are used to represent numbers and letters and discuss how our need to perform operations on larger and more complex values brought us from our 8-bit video games to beautiful Instagram photos, and from the unreadable garbled text in our emails to a universal language encoding scheme.

This video will talk about a fundamental part of all modern computers. The thing that basically everything else uses - the Arithmetic and Logic Unit (or the ALU). The ALU may not have to most exciting name, but it is the mathematical brain of a computer and is responsible for all the calculations your computer does! And it's actually not that complicated.

Today we’re going to create memory! Using the basic logic gates we discussed in episode 3, we can build a circuit that stores a single bit of information, and then through some clever scaling (and of course many new levels of abstraction) we’ll show you how we can construct the modern random-access memory, or RAM, found in our computers today.

Today, we’re going to build the ticking heart of every computer - the Central Processing Unit or CPU. The CPU’s job is to execute the programs we know and love - you know, like GTA V, Slack... and PowerPoint. To make our CPU, we’ll bring in our ALU and RAM we made in the previous two episodes, and then, with the help of Carrie Anne’s wonderful dictation, (slowly) step through some clock cycles.

This nutrition-based curriculum introduces students to the fundamentals of healthy food choices. With engaging hands-on activities, students will become more aware of calories, serving size, and the nutrients they should get “more of” and “less of.” Designed for use by high school teachers, the emphasis is on an inquiry approach that is customizable to science, health, and/or family and consumer science classes, aligning with current education standards in these curriculum areas. 

We’re going to take our first baby steps from hardware into software! Using that CPU we built last episode, The Central Processing Unit: Computer Science Crash Course #7, we’re going to run some instructions and walk you through how a program operates on the machine level. We'll show you how different programs can be used to perform different tasks, and how software can unlock new capabilities that aren't built into the hardware.

We’re going to look at how CPU speeds have rapidly increased from just a few cycles per second to gigahertz! Some of that improvement, of course, has come from faster and more efficient transistors, but a number of hardware designs have been implemented to boost performance.

Smoking may be at near-record lows, but vaping remains popular. Among high school seniors, nearly 1 in 3 admitted to using some type of vaping product. Vaping is the act of inhaling and exhaling the vapor produced by an e-cigarette or similar device. The term is used because e-cigarettes do not produce tobacco smoke, and instead produce a vapor that consists of fine particles. So, why is vaping so popular and is it a healthier alternative to smoking cigarettes? Have your students watch the video and respond to the questions. 

Since Joseph Marie Jacquard’s textile loom in 1801, there has been a demonstrated need to give our machines instructions. In the last few episodes, our instructions were already in our computer’s memory, but we need to talk about how they got there - this is the heart of programming. Today, we’re going to look at the history of programming.

This resource includes quizzes for popular sports: baseball, softball, basketball, soccer, football, and volleyball. These quizzes are created annually by Referee Magazine editors. They are based on high school rules and are intended to help officials test their knowledge. 

To gain access to the quiz and downloadable PDF, users must enter their name and email address. 

This is a comprehensive unit plan for beginning weight lifting. This resource includes a block plan, detailed lesson plans, task cards, organizational plan, parent letter, skill charts, and assessments. This is a great tool for teachers as they are planning a weight training unit. 

We ended the last episode, Early Programming: Crash Course Computer Science #10,  with programming at the hardware level with things like plugboards and huge panels of switches, but what was really needed was a more versatile way to program computers - software!

Carrie Anne is going to start our overview of the fundamental building blocks of programming languages. We’ll start by creating small programs for our very own video game to show how statements and functions work. We aren’t going to code in a specific language, but we’ll show you how conditional statements like IF and ELSE statements, WHILE loops, and FOR loops control the flow of programs in nearly all languages, and then we’ll finish by packaging up these instructions into functions that can be called by our game to perform more and more complex actions.

Algorithms are the sets of steps necessary to complete computation - they are at the heart of what our devices actually do. And this isn’t a new concept. Since the development of math itself, algorithms have been needed to help us complete tasks more efficiently. Today we’re going to look at a couple of modern computing problems, like sorting and graph search, and show how we’ve made them more efficient so you can easily find cheap airfare or map directions.

This video will talk about how we organize the data we use on our devices. You might remember last episode, Intro to Algorithms: Crash Course Computer Science #13,  we walked through some sorting algorithms, but skipped over how the information actually got there in the first place! And it is this ability to store and access information in a structured and meaningful way that is crucial to programming. From strings, pointers, and nodes, to heaps, trees, and stacks, get ready for an ARRAY of new terminology and concepts.

We’re going to take a step back from programming and discuss the person who formulated many of the theoretical concepts that underlie modern computation - the father of computer science himself: Alan Turing. Normally, we try to avoid “Great Man" history in Crash Course because, truthfully, all milestones in humanity are much more complex than an individual or single lens.

This video will talk about how HUGE programs with millions of lines of code like Microsoft Office are built. Programs like these are way too complicated for a single person, but instead require teams of programmers using the tools and best practices that form the discipline of Software Engineering. We'll talk about how large programs are typically broken up into function units that are nested into objects known as Object-Oriented Programming, as well as how programmers write and debug their code efficiently, document and share their code with others, and also how code repositories are used to allow programmers to make changes while mitigating risk.

So you may have heard of Moore's Law and while it isn't truly a law it has pretty closely estimated a trend we've seen in the advancement of computing technologies. Moore's Law states that we'll see approximately a 2x increase in transistors in the same space every two years, and while this may not be true for much longer, it has dictated the advancements we've seen since the introduction of transistors in the mid-1950s. So today we're going to talk about those improvements in hardware that made this possible - starting with the third generation of computing and integrated circuits (or ICs) and printed circuit boards (or PCBs). But as these technologies advanced a newer manufacturing process would bring us to the nanoscale manufacturing we have today - photolithography.

In this resource, students will understand the specific physical causes of concussions and the development of new computer software and digital imaging techniques that help measure and map the damage due to concussions. This resource has a link to a video as well as multiple websites and lesson plans. 

Computers keep getting faster and faster, and by the start of the 1950s, they had gotten so fast that it often took longer to manually load programs via punch cards than to actually run them! The solution was the operating system (or OS), which is just a program with special privileges that allows it to run and manage other programs. So today, we’re going to trace the development of operating systems from the Multics and Atlas Supervisor to Unix and MS-DOS, and take a look at how these systems heavily influenced popular OSes like Linux, Windows, MacOS, and Android that we use today.

So, we’ve talked about computer memory a couple of times in this series, but what we haven’t talked about is storage. Data written to storage, like your hard drive, is a little different because it will still be there even if the power goes out - this is known as non-volatile memory. Today we’re going to trace the history of these storage technologies from punch cards, delay line memory, core memory, magnetic tape, and magnetic drums, to floppy disks, hard disk drives, CDs, and solid-state drives. Initially, volatile memory, like RAM was much faster than these non-volatile storage memories, but that distinction is becoming less and less true today.

This is a handbook of ideas for teaching Adventure Education. Broken down into different sections, this handbook is complete with learning activities, visuals, and resources.
Taking care of the environment while participating in outdoor pursuits is highlighted on pages 87-92. 

This free resource from Open Online Physical Education Network contains a variety of activities, assessments, lesson plans, and planning tools designed to teach students about the sport of roundnet.

In this module, the "Etiquette Discussion Exit Slip" tool is in assessing students. 

Note:  Open Online Physical Education Network is a free resource, but teachers need to create a free account to access the resources available.

The MyPlate Plan shows your food group targets – what and how much to eat within your calorie allowance. Your food plan is personalized, based on your age, sex, height, weight, and physical activity level. The MyPlate Plan is also available in Spanish.

This is an interactive webpage allowing students to enter their information with the webpage auto-calculating. Students are then given plans related to the caloric needs of students. 

We’re going to look at how our computers read and interpret computer files. We’ll talk about how some popular file formats like txt, wave, and bitmap are encoded and decoded giving us pretty pictures and lifelike recordings from just strings of 1’s and 0’s, and we’ll discuss how our computers are able to keep all this data organized and readily accessible to users. You’ll notice in this episode that we’re starting to talk more about computer users, not programmers, foreshadowing where the series will be going in a few episodes.

Often files are way too large to be easily stored on hard drives or transferred over the Internet - the solution, unsurprisingly, is to make them smaller. Today, we’re going to talk about lossless compression, which will give you the exact same thing when reassembled, as well as lossy compression, which uses the limitations of human perception to remove less important data. From listening to music and sharing photos, to talking on the phone and even streaming this video right now the ways we use the Internet and our computing devices just wouldn’t be possible without the help of compression.

We are going to start our discussion on user experience. We've talked a lot in this series about how computers move data around within the computer, but not so much about our role in the process. So today, we're going to look at our earliest form of interaction through keyboards. We'll talk about how the keyboard got its qwerty layout, and then we'll track its evolution in electronic typewriters, and eventually terminals with screens. We are going to focus specifically on text interaction through command-line interfaces, and next week we'll take a look at graphics.

We begin our discussion of computer graphics. So, we ended the last episode (Keyboards and Command Line Interfaces: Crash Course Computer Science #22) with the proliferation of command line (or text) interfaces, which sometimes used screens, but typically electronic typewriters or teletypes onto paper. But by the early 1960s, a number of technologies were introduced to make screens much more useful, from cathode ray tubes and graphics cards to ASCII art and light pens. This era would mark a turning point in computing - computers were no longer just number-crunching machines, but potential assistants interactively augmenting human tasks. This was the dawn of graphical user interfaces which we’ll cover more in a few episodes.

We’re going to step back from hardware and software, and take a closer look at how the backdrop of the cold war and space race and the rise of consumerism and globalization brought us from huge, expensive codebreaking machines in the 1940s to affordable handhelds and personal computers in the 1970s. This is an era that saw huge government-funded projects - like the race to the moon. And afterward, a shift towards the individual consumer, commoditization of components, and the rise of the Japanese electronics industry.

We're going to talk about the birth of personal computing. Up until the early 1970s components were just too expensive, or underpowered, for making a useful computer for an individual, but this would begin to change with the introduction of the Altair 8800 in 1975. In the years that follow, we'll see the founding of Microsoft and Apple and the creation of the 1977 Trinity: The Apple II, Tandy TRS-80, and Commodore PET 2001. These new consumer-oriented computers would become a huge hit, but arguably the biggest success of the era came with the release of the IBM PC in 1981. IBM completely changed the industry as its "IBM compatible" open architecture consolidated most of the industry except for, notably, Apple. Apple chose a closed architecture forming the basis of the Mac versus PC debate that rages today. But in 1984, when Apple was losing market share fast it looked for a way to offer a new user experience like none other - which we'll discuss next time.

We're going to discuss the critical role graphical user interfaces, or GUIs played in the adoption of computers. Before the mid-1980's the most common way people could interact with their devices was through command-line interfaces, which though efficient, aren't really designed for casual users. This all changed with the introduction of the Macintosh by Apple in 1984.

From polygon count and meshes, to lighting and texturing, there are a lot of considerations in building the 3D objects we see in our movies and video games, but then displaying these 3D objects of a 2D surface adds an additional number of challenges. So we’ll talk about some of the reasons you see occasional glitches in your video games as well as the reason a dedicated graphics processing unit, or GPU, was needed to meet the increasing demand for more and more complex graphics.

We’re going to begin with computer networks, and how they grew from small groups of connected computers on LAN networks to eventually larger worldwide networks like the ARPANET and even the Internet we know today.

This video is about how that stream of characters you punch into your browser's address bar, like "youtube.com," returns a website. Just to clarify, we're talking in a broader sense about that massive network of networks connecting millions of computers together.