Visit

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

Explorations in AI LLMs

We can look at what current AI LLM's are able to do. Here are some tasks that were tested in February 2026 that some AIs (LLMs) did better on than others.

• Generate a study guide for a geography quiz bowl on Latin America.
• Generate a map of Latin America that has countries, capital cities of countries, and the flag for each country.
• Take all sample questions from the DOE Middle School Science Bowl page, extract out all Life Science questions, and give a pdf.
• Create a Python flask server for a quiz program.

AIs/LLMS to try.

• Claude (Anthropic)
• Gemini (Google)
• CoPilot (Microsoft)
• Others: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Llama

Nice comparison and tips: https://www.aitoolssme.com/comparison/language-models

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.

• Number guessing game: I have a secret number that I have picked that is between 1 and 1,000. You can make guesses, and I will tell you whether you have it right or are too high or too low. Make an algorithm to decide on how you will pick the next number to ask. How many guesses will it take you to get the right answer? What if I have a secret number between 1 and 1,000,000?
• Prime testing: I give you a random number between 1 and 200. You want to check if it is prime or not using trial division. What are the possible divisors that you will need to check? What if the random number is between 1 and 1,000,000? (In general, you need to test primes up to the square root of the number, but why?) We can also look at the total number of divisions needed to compute all of the primes that are less than 100; method 1 tests each number individually, method 2 uses the Sieve of Eratosthenes.
• 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.

Math

There is all kinds of math that gets used in computer science that is interesting and accessible to high school students, and some to middle school students.

• Add up the numbers 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5. You get ... 15. What if we want to add up the integers from 1 to 100? We don't want to do that by hand. There is a formula (the "arithmetic sum" formula") that we can use (100*101/2). But how do we know the formula works? We can prove it, and the story is that a very young Carl Friedrich Gauss came up with the formula when given this as busy work by a teacher.
• How many of the integers between 1 and 10 are prime? Four of them, so 4/10 are prime. How many between 1 and 100? 25 of them, so 1/4 are prime. How many between 1 and 200? It is less than 1/4 of them. Prime numbers get more rare as the numbers get larger. Can we give some intuition for why? We can... But also, do the primes every get to be so rare that there aren't any more? We can give a pretty easy argument that in fact there are infinitely many prime numbers, so we will never run out.

Paper Folding

These are good for younger visitors. Depending on the age and time, more or less would need to be done ahead of time. Middle schoolers should be able to do everything from a printed template. Pre schoolers would need everything already done, and would be just trying them out (and/or decorating or coloring them). In between ages would be somewhere in between.

• Paper airplane contest. Could be furthest distance, furthest glide, most accurate, most loops, going around an obstacle, ... Some designs to try: https://www.funpaperairplanes.art/
• Flextangle - https://babbledabbledo.com/paper-toys-flextangles/ (template)
• Flexagon - https://www.auntannie.com/Geometric/Flexagon/
• TetraFlexagon - https://www.auntannie.com/Geometric/TetraFlexagon/