In this activity, students will explore the idea of “data” and how it provides a lens through which to view different aspects of human experience. Students will interrogate the affordances and constraints of data as a form of representation and speculate about the effects data can have on human perception and behavior by fitting data into different schemata, developing their own data schemata, and comparing the data schemata of different institutions in their lives with the schemata they develop to represent themselves.

In this activity, students will create a model of a computer designed to accomplish important tasks that align with their personal interests or the needs of a friend/family member they interviewed in a previous lesson. Then, students will discuss tradeoffs in design: the value judgements computer designers make when they build computers for consumers to purchase.

In this activity, students will compete in a shell game tournament while they learn about different search strategies that computers perform on sorted collections of data.

In this lesson, students will explore the relationship between website file size, request volume, and internet speed. They will then unpack how website design impacts accessibility for web users with slow or unreliable internet, outdated computers, or other constraints that lead to information access issues.

This activity will show the sorting process using the Quick Sort Divide and Conquer algorithm that is used by a computer when sorting data without using a computer.