I recently came across a book published in 1968 entitled “How to Build a Working Digital Computer” by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, and Allen M. Wolk. Believers in the “learn by doing” philosophy, they show how to construct such a computer using “simple inexpensive components usually found around the house or in a neighborhood…
The CARDIAC Instructable presented here is not a computer, it’s a device to help you understand how a computer works. You the user will: decode instructions by sliding panels up and down, move the program counter “lady bug” from one memory location to the next, perform the duties of an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), read…
Computational thinking has been a hugely successful idea and is now taught at school in many countries across the world. Although I welcome the positioning of computer science as a respectable, influential intellectual discipline, in my view computational thinking has abstracted us too far away from the heart of computation – the machine. The world…
Increasingly, though, I am uncomfortable with the distinction we casually make between “pro” users and “regular” users. I don’t think these sorts of utilities are useful just for computer nerds. (There’s another category we should leave behind us.) I think they’re useful for everybody. Put another way: we’re all “pro” users. I want to…
When a neighbor asks her what she’s doing on her computer, the girl replies ‘What’s a computer’ making the not-so-subtle point that an iPad Pro is more than enough computer for many tasks. Source: Apple Posts ‘What’s a Computer’ Video Promoting the iPad Pro – MacStories I’ve tried out using an iPad as my mobile…
Turing Tumble is a new type of game where players (ages 8+) build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. It’s fun, addicting, easy-to-learn, and while you’re playing, you discover how computers work. I’m all about teaching kids to code. When I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I saw how valuable…