Unit 1 - The Internet

In this lesson, students will be introduced to how bits are transmitted over the most common mediums (copper wire, fiber-optic cable, and radio waves) used to connect devices on the Internet. They then chose a device that transmits bits and research that device and the system it uses. Students create a poster presenting their findings, and the lesson concludes with a gallery walk of the posters.

In this lesson, students explore some fascinating stories from the news and history (and the future) about number encodings in computers. These stories should serve to illuminate how the kinds of decisions students have been making about number encodings are the same kinds of things that real scientists in the world have to worry about, sometimes with disastrous consequences. While this lesson has the possibility of running long, it is meant only as a short excursion into real-world application and should be limited to one class period.

In this and the subsequent lesson, we consider some of the strategies used to construct networks and find paths for data in them. While this has a connection to ideas about the Internet, the focus of these lessons is on algorithms, formal techniques, and processes for solving problems. Students will explore and solve the Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) problem, first, in an unplugged fashion on paper. The real challenge is not in solving a particular instance of the minimum spanning tree, but to develop an algorithm, a clear series of steps, that if followed properly, will solve any instance of the problem. There is a possible misconception to look out for: the MST has a definite, verifiable optimal solution, as opposed to the Text Compression problem (from Unit 1), which does not.

In this lesson students will explore the Single Source Shortest Path problem, by solving the problem with pencil and paper first, then by following a famous algorithm that solves the shortest path problem known as Dijkstra’s Algorithm. Even though this is an algorithms detour, there is a strong connection in this lesson to routing algorithms used on the Internet. This lesson also introduces ideas about how we analyze algorithms: looking for correctness, efficiency and running time. As foreshadowing: in the next lesson students will act out another distributed shortest path algorithm used by routers to learn about the Internet dynamically.

This lesson is the last of the algorithm series. Building off of the previous lesson about shortest path algorithms, the activity in this lesson shows how routers learn about the rest of the Internet in order to route traffic so it takes the shortest path. In the previous lessons, students use the Internet Simulator to send packets to other students through simulated routers. The path that the packet follows, and how the router knows where to send it, however, has been largely untouched. Today, students simulate the process of a router joining a network and generating a router table that would allow them to send packets to anyone else in their network as efficiently as possible. They then reflect on the process by comparing the similarities between the SSSP problem and the process the used today, and how it facilitates the structure of the Internet.