Internet Science Explorations Syllabus

The following arrangement of activities is simply a suggestion. You can mix and match the activities to fulfill requirements you have with helpers or you own idea of how to tie the material together best.

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Day One

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Introductions:
Setup: None
Who we are, what is SUCCEED, games to learn about people or put people into groups. Games include:

Interviewing. Students interview in pairs. Then, each student introduces his or her partner, by either going around the room or by making the next student introduced have something in common with the person who was just introduced. For example: Sarah introduces Nicole: Nicole is 13, goes to DSA and likes pizza, the color blue, and reading science fiction. The next person introduced must have at least one thing in common -- Ryan is 13, Mike likes pizza, and Michelle goes to DSA, so any one of them could be introduced next.
Students line up in order of birthdays, but they can't talk while they arrange themselves. Set a time in which they have to line up. Students pair off in this line. (instead of birthdays, can use alphabetical order, but don't use last names if there are siblings!)
Go around the room, making each person say his or her name, as well as all the names previous, in order.

What is the Internet?
Setup: Arpanet Handouts copied for students
What does "internet" mean to the students? How do they use it? Explain a little bit of the history behind the internet (its purpose, etc), and the different "rules" of the internet. See Arpanet Handout for more information. Talk about why other rules of the internet might not work: How many connections if each person connected with each other person? How hard if there was a hierarchy? What would happen if it worked like a chain where each person was connected to only one person in front and one person behind and one connection broke? (This is a good place for the Server Knots activity). After discussing the Internet on a smaller scale, discuss how it works in the "big picture". If on a time crunch, you can move ahead to the ASCII activity.

Model of the internet: Computers sending messages to each other
Setup: see ASCII activity instructions
Set up the ASCII activity; explain the computers send things in codes (mention binary if you think the students have the background for understanding). Explain what ASCII stands for (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) and hand out ASCII tables. Then, do the ASCII activity.

Day Two

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Exploring the Internet: How Search Engines work
Setup: None
Explain how search engines work (meta tags, category searches like Yahoo) and how best to use search engines to find what you're looking for (Boolean logic). For example, if you just search for "bats" in Yahoo, and then look at the websites (NOT categories) it gives you, some are the mammal and some are the baseball bat, but the top sites are all about the animal. But if you were looking for information about baseball bats, you would have to add something to the search, like the word baseball. Use a Venn diagram to explain what this does: one circle with everything baseball, one with everything bats, and the part overlapping is what you get when you search for "baseball AND bats".

Scavenger Hunt
Setup: Scavenger Hunt handouts
You may want to shorten this scavenger hunt; the students will not get through it before getting bored with the activity. Another option is to assign a couple groups to each page or set of question, and then have them "prove" to the class why their answers are right. If you have a couple groups on the same questions, they will probably have different answers on some questions. These are the ones to use for the "proving" part of the activity. Discuss what makes a good source and what does not (reliability of the internet). Basically, have the students realize that information about United States death rates are more trustworthy from www.census.gov than from some guy's angelfire site.

Day Three

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PB&J progamming
Setup: Bag of bread, jar of peanut butter, jar of jelly, a knife. You probably will want some napkins, too.
*Note: This activity can be an introduction to UNIX, Search Engines, or HTML programming. Place it where you think it makes the most sense*
Explain to the students that computers and the internet are tools and programs; they do not think or know what you are doing: "When using UNIX through Terminal, you're using a text-based operating system, and there are different commands that will make the computer do different things. The most important thing to remember is that the computer will do only what you tell it to do, even if it doesn't really make sense. For instance, you can tell the computer to remove all the commands, including the remove command. Now, this will stop your computer from working, but it goes ahead and does it anyway, until it doesn't have a remove command and can't remove any more commands!"

Introduce a helper (or yourself, if you have a helper to stay in the room through the activity) as a Computer. The students' job is to create a set of instructions for the Computer to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, remembering that the Computer doesn't know anything about the project or goal in mind and can't figure anything out for itself.

Have the Computer (helper or yourself) leave the room while the students come up with a set of instructions and write them on the board. The Computer will come back in and start with the instructions, paying no attention to anything said by the students during this time. Go through this process a couple times, having the students refine the instructions based on what didn't work. For instance, the Computer may not do anything the first time with the instruction "Get a piece of bread" or "Open the bag of bread" because the Computer doesn't know what bread is or where to find it. The students must then add something like: "The bread is the leftmost object on the table". Similarly, the Computer does not know how to perform functions like opening jars or getting peanut butter, or even how much peanut butter to get. Let the students figure out how to explain these functions. The extent to which you want to make the Computer have no knowledge is your decision, but keep in mind the level of the students and how long it will take them to write the instructions. This activity should not take more than 45 minutes.

Making Web pages
Setup: students must have their scan accounts. Handouts of basic HTML and emacs commands for each student
*Note, if this is the first time they have been really using UNIX, you may want to go over some basic commands in UNIX, explaining that it is an OS like Windows or Macs, except that UNIX is all text-based. Have them learn some simple commands, like ls and cd, explaining what each means. *

Explain that websites are made through a set of text instructions in a language called HTML. To make HTML documents, you can use any type of text editor (have them give examples of these to make sure they understand), like Word. Just as the operating system of Windows has Word, Unix has its own set of text editors, one of vi or emacs. Have one student in the group log onto their accounts and make a public_html folder. (The whole group will make one website on a single account) then make a document in emacs (or vi, depending on your preference) called index.html. Explain that these two names, public_html and index.html are names that are special for the computer; it knows to let anything in the public_html folder be read by other computers through the internet, and to automatically go to index.html when someone looks in this account. Help them make a basic webpage, explaining tags as you go. Show them how to change font sizes and colors and centering, and let them play around with this, and let them look at their pages on the web. Make sure each student writes a little on the webpage, something like:

Hi. My name is Shawn. I am writing this page at Shodor, and I really like pizza. I am going into seventh grade next year, and my favorite subject is math.

Next, teach the students how to make links, and let them make these on their site.

Day Four

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Using the Internet to Communicate with Email
Setup: accounts (ise1, ise2, ise3, ise4, ...) must be on server. Have account names as well as passwords on slips of paper for each student. Send an email to the students, so they will have mail when they check it. Make sure all computers have Eudora if you plan to use it instead of pine.
Have copies of the Email Etiquette handout for each student.
Go over the Email Etiquette handout and the proper uses of email. Give each student the opportunity to log on to his email account, read mail, and send a message to another student in the class (you will want to assign this to lessen confusion)

Using the Internet to Communicate with Talk
Setup: The students must have their accounts already (see Email section of this page)
*Note, if this is the first time they have been really using UNIX, you may want to go over some basic commands in UNIX, explaining that it is an OS like Windows or Macs, except that UNIX is all text-based. Have them learn some simple commands, like ls and cd, explaining what each means. *

Discuss different types of ways to communicate in real time using the internet,\ such as chat rooms, AIM, IRC, etc. Have the students use Terminal to communicate through the talk command:

talk username@computer

For example:

talk ise4@scan.shodor.org

The other person (in this example ise4) will get a message that looks like this\ :

Message from Talk_Daemon@scan at 14:14 ...
talk: connection requested by ise1@scan.shodor.org
talk: respond with:  talk ise1@scan.shodor.org

The person called writes:

talk caller@computer

For example:

talk ise1@scan.shodor.org

and the two people have established a connection and type. When the students are to stop the connection, use the quit command.
If at all possible, have a number of interns in other rooms for the students to talk to instead of talking to each other (students talking to each other may create problems if some students are already friends or are having problems getting along).

Note: If there is still time at the end of the day, you may discuss how the Internet is kind of like the PBJ activity and writing commands to talk and log in and out of scan through UNIX. There is a set of commands to tell the computer to make webpages, using a special type of protocol called HTML. You may want to show them some page sources, and see how much they can figure out. Find one with meta tags, and hint at search engine use that will be explained more tomorrow.

Use Other Chat Services for the Students to talk with Each Other
Setup: Make sure you have an IRC server available for the students to use. It is preferable if you run this IRC server, but it is not necessary. You may also wish to register a couple of temporary AIM accounts too.
Use this section to show the students that alternatives exist other than AIM, MSN, or yahoo when chatting to each other on the Internet. Consult other websites on the Internet if you don't know how to work with IRC. A brief tutorial on how to configure clients for Shodor is available. You could also demonstrate AIM and other commercial IM services, but chances are the students have already had exposure to these services.

Day Five

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Talking with Scientists

Scientists were invited to chat with the ISE students over the IRC server at Shodor. This enables them to discover what scientists do in the professional and academic world. You may wish to set up standard usernames so the students don't get distracted by that (ise1, ise2, ise3, etc.)

Making Web Pages (2)
Let the students continue with their websites, teaching them how to add images with secure copy (scp). You can let them use images on the web, or take pictures of them with the digital camera.

Other Activities

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Spreading Viruses
Setup: each student must have a number of paper squares equal to the number of students in the class. One student's squares must all have x's or another mark on them.

Server Knots
Setup: several short ropes
Outside, have the students get in a circle and hold hand to a person who is notnext to them. This should make the students, all holding hands, in a kind of tangled knot. It looks like they're all interconnected, and that this would be a good way to have everything connected in the internet. Now have the students untangle themselves without letting go. They will (eventually!) be in a circle, and this doesn't seem as efficient a way to connect everyone. Some connections are very long, and the ones that aren't can be made long if just one person in the chain breaks. Explain that hubs or routers work to be a source of lots of connections. Have one or two students each get several ropes. These students are routers. Make sure the routers are connected to each other (holding hands). In the other hand, have each router hold the ropes at the ends, and the rest of the students holds on to the other ends. Now, if a computer (not a router) stops their connection, it doesn't really affect anyone else's connections. This is a better model, or representation, of how the internet works, and it works better than the human knot of before.

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Last modified: 30 July 2003
Renee Gerber
Albert Ren