Coding

Interesting lecture tonight. Coding is now used to represent programming, code.org, coder dojo and a number of other sites related to teaching students programming techniques. However the word coding means something different for those in Computer Science. It is error detection, compression and encoding.

Checking parity bits (interesting that I was introduced to this through my certificate in business computing through data transmissions, we knew them as the "party" bit could have been some confusion here) though in the context that we are looking at we are checking wether is byte has been sent right. Introduce csunplugged activity here http://csunplugged.org/error-detection. 

In the compression we looked at a variety of compression techniques though lossy was shown as an example and probably as much as students need to know for there assessment. Students being able to compare a variety of compression techniques and what it does to an image. Imagine one if the high quality photos converted to a low quality jpg, gif, png with various changes made on quality, introduce grey scale as well. Simple activity that students can gather so much from.

Also look at what happens when you zip, what's happening in the background.

The last one we looked at encryption or encoding. Why do we want to encrypt a message, could be an interesting task in a class for students to encrypt messages and pass them around and have the teacher intercept them not knowing what the message is. Who is going to give up the cipher?
A possible activity could be http://csunplugged.org/public-key-encryption

The different types of attacks were takes about. An attack is a way of solving a cipher.

Brute force

Introduce the rest of the attacks.

A great lecture plus I also was able to talk about the assessment with the lecturer. I have started well but need to rein in my quotes and not get lost in the work. This is about resources and wether they would be good for teachers. Don't forget heading and sub heading.

Updates may happen tommorow as I read back through my notes