The IEEE Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) organised its first Annual Student Open Educational Resources (OER) Contest and Alex Zhang Caiqi, (BSc (Hons) in Computing, Year 3) won the First Prize with his OER work titled “Learning Computing by Card Magic”.
OERs are publicly available web-accessible entities that can be used for teaching and learning. Many instructors around the world use OERs to supplement their teaching. ‘’Learning Computing by Card Magic’’ is a practical video tutorial created by Alex that aims at teaching basic computing knowledge by playing card magic. To arouse the interest of the audience, Alex first shows a card trick followed by an explanation of the underlying coding concepts. A simple program is formulated at the end to simulate the magic procedure. It helps to improve students’ programming skills and consolidate their understanding of the related theories by using “magic” as an innovative and attractive medium in the OER.
“I really appreciate my supervisor, Dr Henry Chan, who gave me so many precious suggestions about my work and recommended me to join the contest,” Alex said. He is considering developing the magic computing tutorial into a series, illustrating other computing knowledge such as the conversion between decimal numbers and binary numbers, and common data structures, with more examples.
OERs are publicly available web-accessible entities that can be used for teaching and learning. Many instructors around the world use OERs to supplement their teaching. ‘’Learning Computing by Card Magic’’ is a practical video tutorial created by Alex that aims at teaching basic computing knowledge by playing card magic. To arouse the interest of the audience, Alex first shows a card trick followed by an explanation of the underlying coding concepts. A simple program is formulated at the end to simulate the magic procedure. It helps to improve students’ programming skills and consolidate their understanding of the related theories by using “magic” as an innovative and attractive medium in the OER.
“I really appreciate my supervisor, Dr Henry Chan, who gave me so many precious suggestions about my work and recommended me to join the contest,” Alex said. He is considering developing the magic computing tutorial into a series, illustrating other computing knowledge such as the conversion between decimal numbers and binary numbers, and common data structures, with more examples.
