The VCTAL modules are intended to provide 4-6 days of high school classroom activities on a variety of topics that introduce computing and computational thinking but are drawn from applications in everyday life. Our goal is to show broad applicability of computational thinking and make it relevant to students.
The Modules:
Are student-centered, activity-driven, and problem-based to appeal to today’s students who favor active learning paradigms
Incorporate the use of computer applications to encourage hands-on experimentation
Are self-contained text and problem material covering roughly one week of class meetings of 40-50 minutes each
Consist of a Student Module and a Teacher Guide
Include an associated “teaser” or mini-module covering just one portion of the full module to allow insertion into an already crowded curriculum
Allow flexible adaptation for use in a variety of courses (not just math or computer science) at a variety of grade levels (9-12)
Published modules are modules that we consider to be "classroom ready" and in their final form (though they may be revised periodically through new editions). Published modules have gone through extensive field testing in high school classrooms and have been honed and edited in response to that testing.
The VCTAL project does not yet have any published modules, but if you would like to review or field test one of the modules in testing, please contact us.
It’s an Electrifying Idea! explores whether it’s time to buy an electric car by examining its cost to own and convenience to operate.
Heart Transplants and the NFL Draft explores how groups of people make decisions on whom to select out of a group of eligible candidates.
Network Capacity Expansion and Utilization uses simple simulations to help students think about congestion and capacity issues that arise when constructing a network or routing traffic within a network.
Privacy: Do You Know What They Know about You? employs a series of case studies and activities to highlight privacy issues and solutions.
Tomography: A Geometric and Computational Approach introduces the science of examining internal structures with external measurements. Students tackle activities where they attempt to determine what is inside some object, how one would measure components inside, and how these measurements can be made more precise.
Foolproof Codes and Ciphers moves from use of code in WWII to more curr ent uses of codes. Students are compare codes for information transmission and t hink about how to encrypt information so that it can still be decrypted.
Fair and Stable Matching explores how to match players from two distinct sets, each with preferences on the other, when we want the resulting matches to be both stable and fair.
Polynomiography and Art encourages computational thinking through one of the most basic and fundamental tasks in sciences and mathematics: solving a polynomial equation.
Connect Four and Games That Can Be More than Just Fun challenges students to find an efficient algorithm to produce perfect play from any configuration (even if mistakes have already been made).
Competition or Collusion applies game theoretic ideas from simple games to real-life decision-making contexts.
Streaming Information introduces students to the issues, methods, and challenges in successfully transmitting information.
Recursion encourages students to think recursively by investigating and inventing their own recursive definitions.