Visit

This page contains activities for when people (e.g., high school students) come to visit the university.

Computers in TC CS Classrooms

If you are visiting computer science at ISU, the computers in the classroom might have guest accounts enabled so that you can use the computers for your activities. If so, the login information will be on the board.

Computer Science at ISU

If you want to learn more about computer science at ISU, here are some links to check out.

• Marketing/admissions information - CS BS, CS MS
• Information for current students - cs.indstate.edu

Cyber Capture the Flag

A cyber capture the flag contest or activity involves using computer skills to figure out clues. This could involve programming, connecting to servers, looking at source code of webpages, decrypting messages, and more.

Here are some to try out...

• Capture The Flag - a short list of problems with hints. A good first attempt.
• PicoCTF - practice problems. Requires creating a login.

Machine Learning

Machine learning includes very many different techniques to "teach" computer algorithms to do well at tasks that humans are normally good at.

Some activities to try out...

• Google Teachable Machine - you provide images or audio, and a machine learning model is created to classify into different classes. For example, is a picture a cat or a dog.

Python Turtle Art

Turtle art in programming is a classic way to learn about loops in programming while getting to do something visual.

Sample programs to try out...

• turtle_art.py

To try the programs out, you should download the program, open the program IDLE, open the python file you just downloaded in IDLE, and run the program. Once you can run the program, you can try changing things in the program to make different pictures.

Algorithms

Computer science is about making computers solve problems and do useful (or fun) things for us, and to do it efficiently. How does google search the entire internet in a fraction of a second? They have to be using the correct algorithms and computers for the task.

Here are some problems that we can look at to see what the best algorithm is.

• Searching a sorted list of numbers, what is the best way? Think of a reverse phone number search. Algorithms to try: linear search, binary search.
• Take an unsorted list of numbers, and put them into sorted order. Algorithms to try: selection sort, merge sort.