In the summer of 2002, we developed a workshop activity for introducing middle-school children to fault-tolerant distributed computing. In subsequent years, we conducted the activity about 8 times for more than 200 students.
The activity requires approximately 3 hours to complete.
The activity is structured as three separate units. Each unit is about 1 hour long and consists of a traditional lecture component, followed by a kinesthetic learning activity. The three units are:
An overview of this workshop was presented at SIGCSE 2003, on Feb 22, 2003. This paper describes the structure and content of the workshop activity, as well as specific suggestions for running the activity successfully.
If you are interested in adapting all or part of this workshop activity for your own purpose, you may find the following resources helpful.