This past week, as part of the AP Computer Science Principals class, I had my students playing with wooden blocks.  What do wooden blocks have to do with technology and computer science?  Well, the activity was designed to give students hands-on experience giving directions and acting like a computer.  


In this group exercise, students wrote and executed their first “program.”  Since most students haven’t already learned any programming languages, we used English.  And instead of executing the programs on an actual computer (which wouldn’t understand English as well as people do), the groups role-played the parts of a simulated computer as they attempted to execute the program in much the same way a real computer would run a real program.